Sátántangó’s very first shot set the stage for everything director Béla Tarr would make, what international festival directors would seek to imitate, and a developmental period for…
There were country music concept albums before In Search of a Song and there would be many after, from modern sounds in country & western music to…
Nagisa Ôshima’s audacity as a filmmaker was unmistakable by the time his third feature hit screens in 1960. The full scope of the filmmaker’s rabid…
Recorded at the height of her powers, Mack the Knife — Ella in Berlin is the definitive answer to the question “Who is Ella Fitzgerald?” It’s an education spread across…
“The cat record” is how I identified Tapestry at the age of five — initial fascination with my mother’s scruffy vinyl copy stemming less from its warm musicality and…
Whenever anyone mentions the 1998 Oscars, the conversation inevitably turns to the great “injustice” of Shakespeare in Love beating Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. But the…
When first stumbling my way through the world of jazz, falling in love with Thelonious Monk seemed only natural. His choices from note to note are ubiquitous,…
The life-changing instance of reason defeating desire has been at the center of such great melodramatic moments as the airport climax of Casablancaand the railway station…
Damning rock n’ roll for its racist and imperialist legacy while having the gall to simultaneously rock like hell, “Amnesia” stands at the thematic center…
Some of Eric Rohmer’s sharpest skewerings of male psychology take as their focus guys defined by disjunctions between appearance and intention — take, for instance, the exceedingly suave…
The daughter of Minos and wife of Theseus has long fascinated many a romantic soul — Euripides, Racine, Swinburne, and Lee Hazlewood all wove the name of…
Her self-titled debut may have spawned four top-ten singles, but it was on Hearts in Armor that Trisha Yearwood properly announced herself as one of the finest country artists…
One is tempted to think of Heat as a culmination, a kind of halfway point in the career of its director, Michael Mann. This isn’t entirely accurate, since the…
Defined by no genre so much as she is her deep roots in Arkansas, and an uneasiness toward her Pentecostal upbringing, Iris DeMent is still more-often-than-not filed…
If The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan proved that Bob Dylan could do anything and everything, The Times They Are a-Changin’ proved that he could hone in on doing one thing very well.…
Though it’s a truth that’s now largely forgotten, at least among the young and the terminally hip, Rod Stewart was once a pretty righteous cat — foremost among interpretive…
Alternate title: The Junkie Blues. Altoist Art Pepper only had a few sessions left before a lengthy stint for heroin in San Quentin loomed, and while all the…