If the wild West still exists anywhere in North America, it’s along the Rio Grande, the border between the U.S. and Mexico. This film, the second directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars as rancher Pete Perkins, explores the emotional and geographical terrain along that great divide. A Mexican man, Melquiades Estrada, is shot … Read more
Robinson’s Gilead is one of the truly great and revelatory novels of the last decade. This is a quiet and almost impossibly elegant meditation on life, faith, doubt, and death–issues Robinson tackles with graceful prose that never feels labored and is suffused with gentle yet devastating shocks of wonder. Gilead has the potential to change … Read more
We used to champion Steven Soderbergh for his versatility and, even more so, the utterly spastic subversion that he wrought with the little-seen Schizopolis. But then he kept inserting Julia Roberts into his films, and, by the time of Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve, seemed to have coasted off, down Easy Street. Now he appears to … Read more
We would have given you decidedly long odds on the chances of us falling for a dandified, self-absorbed porcelain rabbit, yet the latest story from the Newbery Award-winning novelist Kate DiCamillo (whose "See How Far You Get" we published last June) has as much darkness and light, terror and love, and real human warmth and … Read more
Inspirational and occasionally outlandish, this Anthony Hopkins vehicle is a satisfying throwback to old-style, crowd-pleasing cinema. Reuniting with director Roger Donaldson, who took him to great heights in the underrated Bounty, Hopkins plays Burt Munro, the feisty New Zealander who came to America in the 1960s, intent on breaking the world’s land-speed record with his … Read more
French/Austrian director Michael Haneke forces the viewer to take the point of view of a stalker in this dazzlingly complex thriller, which topped many a critic’s list for 2005. Daniel Auteuil–and Juliette Binoche–star as a middle-class Parisian couple whose lives are disrupted by a series of increasingly personal surveillance tapes sent to them anonymously. Each … Read more
Most girls with wide noses, goofy grins, or hair that won’t behave (much less cascade) don’t dream of making it as an actress. But unconventional beauty Lili Taylor is exceptional in that regard, and in many other ways, too. Her gift for inhabiting the essence of her characters–who quite often turn out to be crazy–is … Read more
The religious right is not only destroying America, but eroding the positive powers of religion by linking spirituality to values that are pro-money, pro-war, and pro-business, as well as anti-environmental and anti-intellectual. So says Rabbi Michael Lerner in his new book, The Left Hand of God, in which he also contends that these values will … Read more
Zorn is the anti-Kenny G, an inveterate risk taker whose prodigious technical talent on the sax is matched only by his willingness to use it in radical ways. In his music, which he’s dubbed “radical Jewish culture,” the cacophonous coexists with the sublime, and complexity isn’t an end in itself but rather a means to … Read more
The fact that folk music around here not only outgrew the paisley and leather-fringe years, but continues to thrive, evolve, and inspire young musicians, is due in no small part to the passion of Red House Records founder Bob Feldman, who died last month. Feldman’s spirit will no doubt be the toast of many a … Read more