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,…
In an overhead shot, a 4×4 full of jihadists crawls down a cramped village alleyway, where it’s greeted by a lanky woman in flowing colored…
The Wachowskis have been formal innovators from the start, building a pulley system to show a body falling dead or breakaway sets to stage an elaborately…
A lady of principle, Bettye LaVette boasts a rule of repertoire selection that neatly doubles as a life philosophy for the rest of us: She won’t give…
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…
Pinastri, a scientific term given to a specific moth family, is the safe word for S&M lovers Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna),…
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…
Blackhat opens with a CG-animated representation of a block of data infiltrating a computer network. A tiny glowing grid sliding along a superconducting surface with…
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…
There were times during this especially tumultuous year when it seemed as if the world at large was on the verge of collapsing. A whole…
Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) is an ambitious immigrant who has secured a modest toe-hold distributing heating oil. Though he’s just taken a major risk in…
Comparable to reading a biography with informative chunks ripped out, leaving gaping holes aplenty in the narrative, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is little more than an…
Many of the interactions in Two Days, One Night occur on opposite sides of doorways, liminal spaces echoing protagonist Sandra’s (Marion Cotillard) temporary suspension between…
During the 1960s, painter Margaret Keane’s artwork, largely depicting children with outlandishly large eyes, was sold under the name of her husband, Walter, who apparently…