Rolling Stone named him the Number One Partier in the Nation — he is a resident of the great State of Florida. After he spent six and half years at Florida State University, the mag wrote a six-page article about him and his boozehound partying ways. Who spends years in…
Good films about ballet can be numbered on one hand. And about Chinese dissidents? I’ve still got enough fingers to type this review. Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao’s Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres. Li is played by three actors as he grows from…
Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent — who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs — The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes (Jews like money!). Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) pushes a broom at the Bolshoi, where he lost his status as star conductor 30 years ago…
Suspiciously employing the same thug flashiness, upbeat nouveau-ethnic soundtrack, and glamorously shot poverty found in fellow shantytown raves City of God and Sin Nombre, director Josh Crook’s straightforward revenge thriller also shares those films’ aesthetic aim: to find the tonal overlap between brutality and elegance. If La Soga feels neither…
Delicate, gangly Louis Ives (Paul Dano) yearns to be both a Gatsby-era gentleman and a pretty young lady. Caught fondling a lacy brassiere, he’s dismissed from his teaching post at a Princeton prep school and heads to New York with writerly aspirations, sharing an East 91st Street apartment with Henry…
Midway through Lottery Ticket, a teen-comedy-cum-wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie’s hero, Kevin Carson, goes on a spending spree. The holder of a $370 million lottery ticket that he can’t cash in until after the July 4 holiday, Kevin, played by rapper Bow Wow, accepts a $100,000 loan from a local gangster…
The obnoxious thing about Wicked Sisters at the Women’s Theatre Project is not its sloppy genre-hopping. Nor is it the author’s plain disbelief in the intelligence of her audience, the egregious overacting of three of the production’s four actresses, nor their pathetic — there is no other word — mimicry…
Alfred Phillips is feeling rejected — not dejected, exactly, but a little passed over. The judge for an art show at an area gallery just turned down a canvas from his current body of work, and he’s still smarting. “It stings,” he admits cheerfully, even though he has dealt with…
Strictly speaking, the two scrappy Irish kids in Lance Daly’s Kisses aren’t homeless, but in every sense that matters, they have only each other for shelter. Kylie and Dylan, played with forlorn defiance by Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry, live next door to each other in a dreary housing project…
Writer-director team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer continue to act as the drain trap to our pop-culture toilet. The Date Movie and Meet the Spartans collaborators have made a career of low-overhead channel-surf bricolages catering to ninth-graders with nothing else to do on a Friday night, movies not meant to…
An earthquake has opened an undersea chasm, unleashing a gazillion piranha fish near an Arizona resort town that just happens to be jammed with spring-break partiers anxious to frolic in the pretty blue lake. Horny horror-movie revelers tend to deserve what’s coming to them, a sentiment French-born director Alexandre Aja…
Now, this Tuesday evening isn’t the night for those old raggedy flannels. Or your childhood Care Bears T-shirt gown. Because, even though sitting at home in your jammies tonight does sound relaxing, it sounds even more mundane — especially when you can hit the town while you’re in your nighties…
Rockabilly isn’t hard to spot. If you see a woman covered in ’50s-pinup-style tattoos; if you see a man with greased-back hair and a leather jacket who looks as if he’s pining for a girl named Sandy; if you see a pinstriped, souped-up, chrome-enhanced car so cherry that James Dean…
It’s impossible to pin down the first person who decided to combine everyone’s favorite illegal recreation drug with going to the cinema, but that stoner should probably be awarded. Pot helps make every movie funnier, scarier, more thrilling, and overall more entertaining. It also encourages plenty of snarky comments. It’s…
While in the studio recording their debut album, A.K.A.’s Lori Garrote and Natalie Martinez realized it was time for a name change. And after having learned a thing or three under the tutelage of award-winning engineer/producer John D. Thomas, the girls decided on a name that reflects their new direction…
You’ve likely heard some variation of the saying “The farther south you go, the more north it gets” regarding Florida’s cultural makeup. It’s easy to forget that Florida is not just southern but Southern. And in case you need a reminder of Florida’s Deep South roots, wander on over to…
With the brutally beautiful swells of “Siegfried’s Funeral March” swooping around inside your skull, it can be easy to forget composer/philosopher Richard Wagner’s less glorious moments. For example, there was the time his second wife, Cosima, caught him saying: “All Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan the…
Adventurous wax purists, unite! Listen to a bizarre sampling of musical obscura from around the globe during Radio-Active Records’ “Continental Drift” event featuring the Bally-Hi Soundsystem. Sounds from all over the map — both geographically and stylistically — make up this audio game of truth or dare that could end…
Socially prescribed gender norms stay in place like brick walls in the minds of most, so it’s necessary to bombard such walls with battering rams of deviance. A common and simple tactic for chipping away at the bricks of prejudice is to sport a wardrobe typically associated with the opposite…
The beginning of the 2010 baseball season was filled with so much promise for Florida Marlins fans. They had legitimate up-and-coming stars like Hanley Ramirez and Josh Johnson. They had reigning NL Rookie of the Year Chris Coghlan. The ownership even boldly predicted a playoff berth for the Fish. Then,…
Think twice about starting a fire and asking for Mr. July when you call 911. After all, arson is illegal, and while he may be packing a big hose, he’ll be fully clothed, which pretty much defeats the purpose of calling in the first place. Yet fear not, ladies (and…
Traditional types try to cast the city and its wide array of temptations as the domain of evil. It’s in small-town America, the rhetoric goes, that good, wholesome folks raise good, wholesome kids. But B-horror movies tell us that demons and zombies actually lurk in the backcountry and that these…
