Sergio Leone, who reinvented the gunslinger genre in spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, only directed one film in the fifteen years before his death. That would be this Prohibition-era drama, but in many ways the perfect capstone to his career, blending the spirits of Goodfellas and Great Expectations with one … Read more
Are there three sweeter words than “Peter Sellers retrospective”? Hmmm… “you’ve got mail”—no. “Here’s fifty bucks”—well, maybe. We haven’t seen about half the titles here (yet), but we can tell you with absolutely authority that there are four can’t-lose offerings from the mid-century’s great comedic chameleon: his two Stanley Kubrick collaborations, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita; … Read more
Who wouldn’t want to soar through the air on the wings of a bird? Well, not us, because heights scare the living bejeezus out of us. But otherwise, sure, everybody would. And barring a medically iffy, possibly uninsurable operation to transplant your brain into a duck, Winged Migration is your best option. The product of … Read more
If you combined the directorial styles of Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, and the bloody Grand Guignol of early Peter Jackson in one guy, you might have something like Japan’s Takashi Miike. Except maybe that he makes more films than they do—an astonishing four dozen in the last decade, usually horror and yakuza gangster movies. But … Read more
Even in the age of Xbox, kids of a certain age can still be utterly transfixed by a good old-fashioned circus. Maybe the older and more jaded can be brought back into the tent with this supercool exhibit about the science behind acrobatics, high-wire walking, the trapeze, and all manner of circus daredevilry. The attraction … Read more
Eustace Conway is self-sufficient in ways most of us wouldn’t want to be even if we knew how, in the way almost no American has been since the days of Daniel Boone. The star of Gilbert’s marvelous nonfiction The Last American Man lives on a thousand-acre patch of woods in Appalachia, literally living off the … Read more
When Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, Paul McComas was as shocked as anyone that the man voted most likely to be the voice of his generation would choose eternal silence instead. Unlike the rest of us, McComas actually did something about it. Himself a lifetime victim of depression, the Chicago writer devoted himself to … Read more
Let’s not kid ourselves. Erica Jong’s reputation and following were built on her frank depictions of sex—going all the way back to her debut in 1973, Fear of Flying. She still relies on that old trick, even as she indulges in the chic literary trend of the day, the historic novel. In Sappho’s Leap, Jong … Read more
If you only know these three novels by their Hollywood adaptations—well, then you’re not doing half bad, considering that they’d all rank high in just about anybody’s list of the top-ten all-time noir films. But the originals themselves are among the very best in his genre—however it is you define it. Despite Cain’s sainted place … Read more
If your twin brother died in an accident that was probably your fault, and your father turned the incident into a farcical stage play that was the hit of the season, you’d probably have some issues about that. Angsty teen Judith Shakespeare is aghast when she runs across a draft of Twelfth Night, and hatches … Read more