D-Day turns sixty next month, bringing a barrage of notable World War Two movies on the DVD release front. We’re especially fond of this one, a very different proposition from what you’ll usually find in the genre. Directed in 1968 by John Boorman (at his creative peak, after Point Blank and before Deliverance), Hell avoids … Read more
“You’ll feel like you’re in Mexico!” it says on EBM’s website, which may explain why Dick and Lynne Cheney kept their visit short last March. For our part, we always leave with more than we came for. El Burrito’s boggling array of dried peppers, from ancho to pasilla, can lure anyone into the Mercado, and … Read more
Dyed-in-the-wool Marxists will note that this box set collecting seven of Groucho, Harpo, and Chico’s late-period movies is hardly definitive—their most anarchically funny work, Duck Soup and Animal Crackers, is missing. But we do have the two true classics they made with their most simpatico producer, Irving Thalberg, A Night at the Opera and A … Read more
Everybody thinks modern life moves too fast these days, but for the little village of Quiquendone, it’s literally true. At first, the townspeople in Jules Verne’s allegorical short story (getting its first non-operatic dramatic adaptation at the hands of local troupe Hardcover Theater) live peaceably rustic lives at rustic speeds, as if Newtonian physics were … Read more
A new Jim Jarmusch movie is always cause for celebration around here. Sure, he’s open to charges of languid pacing and, especially in earlier films, an indifference to plot. But there’s a beyond-left-field outlook to his best work, like Ghost Dog and Dead Man, that you just can’t find in any other English-language director. (Liking … Read more
Even if you caught the original production of The Golem during its highly praised run in 1999, you may want to check back to see where the Jeune Lune folks will be taking their collaboratively produced fable: For the theater’s 25th season, they’ve created a more elaborate version that builds on the earlier one. The … Read more
Would you like fries with that? After this film, probably not. Among the many public-relations bodyblows directed at the fast-food industry in the last few years, few have been so direct as this audience favorite at last year’s Sundance film festival. After he heard a McDonald’s spokesman claim that there was no link between obesity … Read more
If he accomplished nothing else, Irish playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan could say that he found a new and memorable way to mangle the English language. Among the eccentrics and outsized personalities of his gentle satire of sappy romances, you’ll find a character named Mrs. Malaprop, mother of the word malapropism, whose complete indifference … Read more
Larson is Minnesota’s answer to Matthew Barney. Both Yale art school alumni subject their not-unattractive physiques to certain trials; more importantly, each seems to operate from an alternate reality that makes full sense only to him. (We need more artists like this.) But where Barney is just plain out there, Larson’s world takes cues from … Read more
Maybe it’s true, as the saying goes, that heavy hangs the head that wears the crown—on the other hand, when you’re the emperor, you get all the best china. This exhibit of more than a hundred rare porcelains, drawn from a private collection in China, showcases the beautiful and highly detailed craftsmanship that graced the … Read more