Creativity is a double-edged sword. This was something I first realized after reading a detailed account of the torture regimen used by the Sforzas, a Renaissance-era Milanese family whose fortune had been made in arms sales. They called it “Lent”: forty days of inventive and excruciating pain-inducing practices almost guaranteed to leave the victim alive … Read more
Immigration to the United States is at its highest level since its historic peak in the 1920s; there really are a lot of people roaming the world, either forced by war or economics or driven by curiosity or circumstance. And many of them, artists included, end up here. (Read some of their stories in the … Read more
Jack Black and Mos Def team with director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Science of Sleep) to give us this oddball comedy about a man who becomes magnetized and erases the entire inventory of videotapes in his pal’s rental store. (The movie takes place in the ’80s.) They end up having to … Read more
It looks like producer J. J. Abrams (the man behind Lost and Alias) took a few cues from legendary horror-meister Val Lewton. In Cloverfield, Abrams’s Godzilla-like monster wreaks havoc on New York City—except he does so at night, and we can’t see a damn thing except shadows and fleeting images of the beast as things … Read more
This is arguably the greatest lucha libre horror film in history. Yes, friends, we know that’s like saying Evan Almighty is the greatest congressional ark-building comedy ever, but this entertaining schlock—starring those masked Mexican wrasslers—cost a hundredth as much, and looks to be ten times more amusing. In Las Momias de Guanajuato (1972), the wrestler/sorcerer … Read more
The latest from director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) is rumored to be a frontrunner for the best-picture Oscar, but that’s highly unlikely. There Will Be Blood is magnificent, epic, and utterly bizarre; films this weird never win the big one. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood features … Read more
Part of the Walker’s Out There festival of experimental theater, this show, by a youthful New York City ensemble called the TEAM (Theater of the Emerging American Moment) defies rampant cynicism by presenting a work of resounding optimism. Set in Kansas, the action unfolds within an evangelical household. The parents have just been killed by … Read more
The History Theatre has hit its share of fouls lately—last fall’s production based on the life of Kirby Puckett was uniformly blasted, and the recent Hormel Girls had a lackadaisical score and a script wholly reliant on stereotype. But this institution also boasts a singular and noble characteristic: It commissions more original works by living, … Read more
Black Label Movement received a hearty welcome with its debut 2006–07 season, garnering praise both for its evocative choreography and athletic, hyperkinetic dancers. The company repays that kindness by opening its sophomore season with the ambitious Wreck, artistic director Carl Flink’s first evening-length piece. Claustrophobics beware: Wreck depicts ten sailors trapped inside the last watertight … Read more
Who better than Robert Bly to revive this cautionary tale of misdirected masculinity? Peer Gynt is the most deplorable of characters, a swashbuckler who, during the course of a single play, manages to desert his mother, cajole a bride into the mountains on her wedding night, get crunk with some hillbillies, and go on a … Read more