Wolfgang Petersen’s early 80s submarine actioner was a surprising hit in America, netting six Oscar nods and much bigger audiences than would normally have turned out for a brooding German drama with an unhappy ending. While sub thrillers had been around long enough for cliches to stick like unwanted barnacles, Petersen found something fresh by … Read more
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s marvelous trilogy provided a worthy capstone to his three-decade career as a leader in European cinema. He retired after finishing Red, and died two years later. Similar to his Decalogue series reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Three Colors is nominally a loose exploration of the Revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski himself … Read more
David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films—among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers—gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as … Read more
Terry Gilliam’s work had always had anarchy deep in its heart, and more than once anarchy has overwhelmed the project entirely. Certainly, our favorite hometown Python can say with some justification that his failures are more interesting than a lot of director’s successes. There is, in fact, a whole cottage industry devoted to chronicling his … Read more
He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians … Read more
This is the Bristol duo that almost singlehandedly invented the late-90s genre du jour, “trip-hop”—meaning atmospheric, heavily remixed club music that brought together elements of electronica, turntablism, rock ’n’ roll, film soundtrack, and torch song. You probably remember Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons best for “Sour Times,” a wonderful, sepia-toned single that hit the airwaves … Read more
Sophomore slump is often nothing more than the indifference of critics and fans who are still digging the first record. Macy Gray got about as big as anyone can get with her 1999 debut, On How Life Is. The freak queen of rock ’n’ soul combined a Jimi Hendrix sense of style with a vocal … Read more
Northfield native Siri Hustvedt first caught our attention with her 1996 novel The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, a self-consciously quirky noir set in a small Minnesota town populated by a ditzy femme-fatale heroine and a cast of flaky eccentrics.What I Loved, her third book, chronicles the quarter-century friendship between a painter and an art historian … Read more
If he were the protagonist in one of his own crime novels, Andrew Vachss might be unbelievable: A hard-as-nails lawyer, grizzled and sporting an eyepatch, who’ll only take cases defending child victims of sexual abuse. But his singleminded, furious crusade is for real, and it informs not just his writing but his whole life. Vachss … Read more
Right out of the gate, with her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, it was clear that Toni Morrison was a writer to be reckoned with, capable of powerfully articulating the rage and despair of black women trying to get by in a society permeated with both racism and sexism. Her big-league status was … Read more