rakemag

We enjoy a make-over just as much as anybody. But when it happens to a favorite dining spot, we get a smidge skittish. Will they go too glossy? Will they forget that we like to bring the kids with us? Happily, the Edina Grill has been successfully updated without losing its soul. There’s a new … Read more

For the food-obsessed, the arrival of Jean-Georges Vongerichten in our town is nothing less than a blessed event. But does Chambers Kitchen live up to the hype? Maybe. The David Rockwell interior achieves cool without sacrificing comfort. The staff, while efficient and knowledgeable, can still manage a genuine smile. But in the end, it’s all … Read more

As a condiment, wasabi is earthy, spicy, and slightly mysterious. As the new sushi place off Washington Avenue, Wasabi is bright, happy, and kinda cute. Glass-bead curtains, green bamboo framework, and an automated door sensor that shouts “genki!” (how are you?) to new arrivals give this place a whimsical touch. What is earthy and spicy … Read more

Bouncing between near misses (Cold Mountain) and outright dogs (the risible Stepford Wives), Nicole Kidman could use a surefire hit, at least critically. Whether or not this so-called imaginary portrait of doomed photographer Diane Arbus will be the tonic for Kidman’s post–Oscar malaise is an intriguing question. Looking almost too clean and bright for its … Read more

We don’t know Kazakhstanis from Martians, but something tells us they’re not the backwater, Jew-loathing whoremongers that writer-producer-star Sacha Baron Cohen makes them out to be. Borat is a mock documentary in which the titular hero, a Kazakhstani television personality, comes to the U.S. on a cross-cultural mission and winds up crossing the Southern states … Read more

Vigorously booed at the Venice Film Festival, acclaimed as masterpiece by others, this time-travel extravaganza hits our shores after six years of labor from director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). Wildly ambitious in its scope, The Fountain takes place over a thousand years and weaves together three stories, with the same actors helming … Read more

At first, it just sounds too good to be true. But as rumors persist that the independent film Home for Purim is generating Oscar buzz, the entire cast and crew—triumphs of mediocrity, each and every one of them—slowly begin to unravel. Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries are always good for an evening of belly laughs, although his … Read more

Even though chronic hay fever keeps him from service in the Marines, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith tells everyone that he’s fighting overseas. All the while, he’s hiding out in a distant city, working in a munitions factory. When a group of down-on-their luck leathernecks hear the truth, they usher poor Woodrow back to his hometown … Read more

Director Richard Linklater’s love of the 1970s may have reached its zenith with this film, which would fit well with the paranoid classics Coppola, Pakula, and Altman made some thirty years ago. Adapting (with author Eric Schlosser) the controversial non-fiction account of the fast-food industry, he avoids the hysterical polemics of, say, Michael Moore, for … Read more

In many ways, Maine is something of a coastal Minnesota. It has loons, moose, and a stump-studded northwoods. It has a Plymouth, an Orono, a Medford, and a Northfield. We have Granite Gear; they have L.L.Bean. It’s like the two states were separated at birth—by glaciers. But you don’t hear much about the hot Maine … Read more