When Katrina struck, he borrowed a truck from the U-Haul dealership where he worked his second job. Instead of loading up his worldly possessions before fleeing the path of the storm, he loaded up relatives and neighbors; they squeezed into the holding cell of the borrowed truck for a dark,…
It’s like clockwork. As each and every night out rolls around, you swear it’ll be filled with excitement, rather than the regular routine of dinner and a movie. But alas, creature of habit, when your head hits the pillow, you’ve somehow wasted your evening filling your face with the usual…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The…
Sometimes the rut you’re in is bigger than all that. Sometimes it’s deeper and wider than just Whoa, I wear too much orange or So there are other channels besides the Spice Channel? Sometimes that rut you’re in is so huge that getting out of it entails not just a…
One of the hottest trends going in the art world is for artists or groups of artists to work under a pseudonym. The phony name is a protest against commercialism in art, and it’s also a heck of a good gimmick. Enter COAX, the nom de brush of a Phoenix…
There’s an oft-repeated urban legend about Dragon Quest’s popularity in Japan: So many gamers ditched school and work to play that the government decreed that future releases had to take place on weekends. In reality, there’s no such law, but as with most myths, the message rings true, even if…
Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (Warner Bros.) At a mere $42 through most websites, this four-film boxed set ranks among the best ever compiled; not only does it contain the restored version of one of the greatest movies of all time (The Wild Bunch), but also three other brilliant westerns…
Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle — Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies…
Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…
What’s an unemployed former superspy to do? Faced with a midlife career change, suave Pierce Brosnan seems to have chosen wry self-mockery, reinventing himself as a scruffy, fallen James Bond surrogate, sometimes still furnished with a license to kill and a certain gift for cool, but far more likely now…
When a movie promises that a character played by Queen Latifah may well die during the course of the action, one might hope that the movie in question is Hostel, so that she could be beaten a few times and then dismembered, ideally by someone who sat through The Cookout,…
According to Occam’s Razor (Elite Entertainment) Black Books: The First Complete Series (BBC/Warner) The Chumscrubber (Universal) The Constant Gardener (Universal) Dead Poets Society: Special Edition (Touchstone) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Bueller . . . Bueller . . . Edition (Paramount) The Flash: The Complete Series (Warner Bros.) The Gambler (Time…
Susan Copeland at Burton Barr Central Library: Hey, America, wake up and smell the discrimination. That’s the theme of Susan Copeland’s exhibition “Refuse,” a name that refers to the materials Copeland uses in her mixed-media creations and to treatment she believes African-Americans get in this country. The strongest pieces in…
Pity the college basketball coach. He toils endlessly to explain the vagaries of offensive sets and defensive zones. He frets over lineups, injuries, and scouting reports. His job is never safe — one losing season, and it’s back to teaching bounce passes to the JV girls at St. Elizabeth’s. Few…
2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants…
Microsoft isn’t described as an underdog very often. But in the world of video games, Sony’s PlayStation is king, and all others fight for scraps. While Microsoft’s Xbox managed to bump the once-great Nintendo into third place, it nevertheless remains a distant second to the PS2, which commands an installed…
Broken Flowers (Universal Home Entertainment) Bill Murray, who long ago swapped manic kineticism for melancholy deadpan, is once more mired in a middle-aged funk; what else is new? As Don Johnston, an aging lothario whose latest young girlfriend is walking out as the audience is just settling in, Murray’s on…
Okay, so I saw a bunch of crap this past year. But I also saw some amazing stuff on local stages — things that made me hopeful that local theater is not destined to repeat the same four musicals (another production of Cabaret, anyone?) and three Neil Simon comedies (my…
When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics –…
If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did…
War is hell, but it can also be high drama. In boots-on-the-ground documentaries like Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, we got a discomfiting look at the brutal realities and moral ambiguities of America’s war in Iraq, where the death toll rises along with the administration’s rhetoric. “I want some answers,”…
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this past year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store: Balzac and…
