An inflated balloon is a strange thing. Air on the outside, air on the inside. As long as you've got your rubber and your air, you've got a pretty decent balloon. It's a vapid structure. Not much substance...

><<Back to Part 3 So here's where the fish get fishier, and their fishiness seeps into our olfactory epithelia. A couple Sundays ago, you probably noticed that the pug-faced quarterback of the...

Anyone who tells you Woody Allen's thrillers are better films than Woody Allen's comedies is lying, to you and also to themselves. Don't trust them. "Manhattan" is better than "Match Point," and even the...

Next summer, say late July, when the sky hasn't freed a drop all season, scoop up a clump of dirt and crush it in your hand. The wind might dust the powder from your palm, but as for those bits beneath...

.I imagine Béla Tarr regards critics' wide praise for his monumental film, the seven-hour and 15-minute "Satantango" (1994), as all of his films, not without a hint of humility, proud though he...

In Brooklyn, at an art exhibit after-party in Aaron Katz's film "Quiet City," one guy on a couch, Charlie, says to another guy, some unnamed guy sitting next to him with nice hair: "I actually just quit...

As a young man, Ingmar Bergman possessed the kind of nondescript, level proportions of face that bear no markings of an uneven mien behind them. His cheeks and jowls were full, yet never exaggerated. His...

The duty of sifting through hours and hours of music and movies, which has long been reserved for festival coordinators and attendees, is giving way to two of our most cherished pastimes: progress and...

And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. As ambitious as that might be, and as admirable as such ambition might seem, it is also one of the most difficult...

A tall, broad-shouldered man walks out onto the terrace of a hotel in the southern France city of Deauville during the midhours of a mild Mediterranean evening. A cream suit-coat cloaks his arms and a...

Watching "The Simpsons Movie" is like sitting at a trial for your entire family: You know their every breath, their every tick, and when they try to pass a lie, you see it as plainly as if it were exhibit...

Toward the end of Werner Herzog's most acclaimed film, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," one of Aguirre's men, starved and hallucinating, inanely prattles in good faith, "That is no ship. That is no forest."...

The opening scene is apt enough so let's begin with it: A clean-cut Harry sits alone on a swing set placed uninvitingly over the dried and bristly summer environs of Privet Drive. His adolescent self seems...

With the solstice already nearly one month behind us, the appearance of a "Summer Activities Guide" might seem as compulsory to the season as that perennial list of big-budget sequels (though we did Fandango...

We found the following document in our mailbox when we arrived at the office Monday morning after the opening weekend of Michael Moore's latest documentary, "SiCKO." The envelope was a plain, white security...

The abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl, former South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, in February of 2002, reminded the world of the danger inherent to journalists working in areas tense...

;"Once" is a contemporary pop musical directed by The Frame's ex-bassist John Carney. The band's current vocalist and guitarist Glen Hansard stars. "Triad Election" DIRECTED BY: Johnny To STARRING: Louis...

The announcement that director Danny Boyle would not return to helm the sequel to his zombie-inspired rager, "28 Days Later," sent a skeptical buzz rampant throughout the blogospheres occupied by the film's...

Earlier this month, a wave of enthusiastic filmmaking by a small but prominent group of directors set forth what could be retrospectively seen (if they can stick around long enough to establish the heft...

Coming to the Bell Auditorium this evening is "Arid Lands," a lushly shot and thoroughly told story about the Columbia Basin in Washington state, its landscape and the people who inhabit it. "Arid Lands" DIRECTED...

Revel in your iPods, MySpaces, cell phones and "pirated" downloads of any-and-everything compressible dear friends, but once, so I hear, long before the day went digital, young people embarked on - and...

At the most basic level of description, "Into Great Silence" is a documentary feature about the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the Carthusian order, housed in the French Alps. "Into Great Silence" DIRECTED...

."Start from the end. You can't tell a story if you don't know how it ends." Thus Lewis (a blind and sagely Jeff Daniels) instructs his roommate and friend Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who suffers...

If you're one to wince at the idea of a 1970s horror film remake ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre," please?), then forgive me, but I'd love to witness whatever involuntary reflex overcomes you upon hearing the...

Mira Nair's ("Monsoon Wedding") colorful adaptation of "The Namesake" focuses on two stories about Bengali cultural identity - one about native Bengali mother Ashima's (Tabu) assimilation to life in America,...

!"300" has been in theaters for three weeks, so I trust that you have either already seen the film or have at least decided whether you will. In a world of file-sharing and blogospheres, what is the whittled-down...

While staying a week in a Paris hostel last spring, I met a Polish man, age 27, named Bartók. He came to Paris for two weeks on vacation before returning to England where he had found employment...

Man can tell a story with a lotta heart, even if he seems to have his priorities in the wrong places. "Black Snake Moan" is like Cinderella comes to Memphis one afternoon. We just bleed more, drink more,...

Like director David Fincher's 1995 film, "Se7en," his latest release, "Zodiac," plays with the viewer's sense of control over the action by limiting its protagonists' omniscience to a series of dead-end...

Germany, 1984. The German Democratic Republic - which, as we know, will fall in five years with the destruction of the Berlin Wall - precipitated in the weeks following Nov. 9, 1989: The date the government...

The Guerilla Girls famously chided the hegemony of the Hollywood apparatus in 2006 when, just weeks shy of the Academy Awards, they put up a giant billboard on a smog covered Sunset Strip intersection....

Kara Walker has done two things: She's made a lot of art, and she's made a lot of noise. Most recognizable among her equally scorned and celebrated body of works are her silhouettes - paper cut-outs depicting...

A child's calm, meandering voice philosophizes over a dusty scene outside a farming community in Iraqi-Kurdistan: "Iraq is not something you can cut into pieces," it says. "Iraq is a country. And how can...

The buzz around David Lynch's film "Inland Empire" is that, as part of the lingering last of a dying breed that learned the craft on celluloid, he chose to film it entirely with a digital camcorder - a...

There is a famous sequence toward the end of Vittorio De Sica's 1948 film, "The Bicycle Thief," during which an unremarkable activity - a crowd emptying a soccer stadium - manifests the underbelly of post-World...

Let me show you where monsters lie: The lawns are green and well-kempt; the bushes are manicured, the flowers potted; the trees are leafy and the breeze that rustles them, gentle; the playground is neat...

Here's a joke for ya: two FBI agents, their director, an aging Mafioso, two lesbians, a couple of ex-cops, three punk rock neo-Nazis, a Latino torture artiste, a mysterious master of disguise, an even...

Americans have always had a fascination with the reluctant, hermetic artist - think Hemingway, Salinger, even Depp. There's a profound incomprehensibility toward the self-restrained subject for whom the...

For the last week and half, a 10-foot-tall red aluminum "A" has stood in the snow before the monochromatic, angular contours of the Regis Center for the Arts in the West Bank Arts Quarter on campus. The...

Two personal yet far-reaching battles compete in alternate worlds in 1944 Spain: one is fought with muskets and blades - blood and fog constitute a country's real, historical nightmare; the other is contained...

;History and science The American Anthropological Association's exhibit, "Race: Are We So Different?", made its world premiere last Wednesday at the Science Museum of Minnesota. The exhibit has been under...

Alfonzo Cuarón's "Children of Men," loosely based on the 1992 P.D. James novel of the same name, is the type of big-minded film that could easily implode under its own heft: a far-reaching narrative...

American horror films have always gauged our society's anxieties and provided a haven, however horrifying it may seem, for us to safely cull out the threats without actually confronting them. "Turistas" DIRECTED...

It would be too easy to begin by pandering to the title's seduction and turn the not-so-clever psychological phenomenon into a not-so-clever rhetorical roast. But might the jury please acknowledge a familiar...

In a film that's packed with perversities, "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple's" most scolding is the finely calibrated sense of consensual corruption of peaceful, idealistic people by the...

With his first two films, director Darren Aronofsky earned some impressive stock among indie moviegoers for his seemingly preternatural eye for well-wrought melodrama and psychological suspense. "The...

If you've consumed even a minute of media in the last five years, it was probably founded in the sinuous roots of reality. But it's not present in the lyrically wistful sense that Thomas Wolfe put it in...

In the end, nearly everybody dies. And in the end, everybody, we learn, is connected. And in the end, be certain that there is dread and there is anguish, as there has been since the beginning. And in...

Booyakesha! Yo, check it America, dis be Ali G and today we be chattin wiv my main man Borat Sagdiyev from Ö Kaizerhstan. Dis year he be releasin a movie dat ims made bout your country. So, now dat eez...

Alejandro González Iñárritu's latest film, "Babel," is spread over three continents, incorporates six languages and meditates on a relationship that knows neither geographic nor linguistic...

He might not have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature last Thursday, but no one in popular music can hold a quill to the verbosity of the lead singer of The Decemberists, Colin Meloy. As fans...

Britain was still acquainting itself with Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the country's youngest prime minister in 170 years, when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997. The...

It's hard to believe 20 years have passed since Janet Jackson ventured away from the warm breast of the Jackson clan and broke onto the scene to claim her own portion of the family's royal pop crown. That...

If you've seen Forest Whitaker's typecast persona as the oversized, self-effacing moralist in "Ghost Dog" or "Phone Booth," you'll understand why he's receiving praise en masse for his latest onscreen...

Two weeks ago, the United States spent $28.1 million to see a group of young men dress up as elderly people and expose themselves in public, launch their bodies into lakes with rockets and consume animal...

The Arts Quarter Collective is a student-run group that supports the collaborative aspect of artmaking and embraces the interdisciplinary and multimedia possibilities afforded by today's artistic and cultural...

When you have two children, you have one favorite. It's a pity, but the question remains: Do you prefer the more intelligent, adventurous, humorous one with an abundance of style and beauty, or, well,...

We're in Hollywood now, so listen well and you might learn something. Anyone who has spent enough time in this land knows that the number of things you can know here is exactly one. It's a simple, hard-rung...

Water has reinforced itself as a pervasive, unstoppable element from East to West - from the 2004 tsunamis that tore through East and South Asia, reaching as far as Kenya and Tanzania in east Africa, to...

In the 1930s, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl directed influential propaganda documentaries commissioned by and valorizing the Nazi party. The most famous of her films, "Triumph of the Will," received...