Gangs of Shanghai Gangs of Shanghai
The scene is Shanghai, or Busby Berkeley's dream of it: a Chinese city of the 1930s, teeming on the outskirts with rickety tenement compounds, bustling in its business district...
Mar 31, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
It’s Easter: He Is Recut It’s Easter: He Is Recut
No flaying below the belt: That's the guiding principle behind the kinder, gentler version of Mel Gibson's biblical blood fest, which has hit the cineplex in time for the Easter ...
Mar 24, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein
Tipsy Turvy Tipsy Turvy
Like a melodrama or a political tract--genres it sometimes resembles, in an honorable way--Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Mondovino has a villain you can hiss at.
Mar 16, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Rock the Casbah Rock the Casbah
What might it mean to call a film indispensable? Perhaps not much. At base level, we'd merely be asserting that other films (maybe the vast majority) are candidates for the garba...
Mar 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Constantine Constantine
About two-thirds of the speaking characters in Constantine are either demons or angels.
Feb 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
My Life as a Man My Life as a Man
I've heard Argentines say that Buenos Aires is more densely populated by psychoanalysts than anyplace else in the world.
Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Moviegoer The Moviegoer
If Herbert Marcuse and Senator Joseph McCarthy had gone to a movie together in the late 1950s--and that could only happen in a movie--they would have walked out, probably not tog...
Jan 27, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Lee Siegel
Blood Simple Blood Simple
Half a century has passed since Manny Farber wrote in these pages about underground films, by which he meant the urban crime movies watched by male loiterers near the Greyhound s...
Jan 20, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Before Night Falls Before Night Falls
The Chilean coup of 1973 was carried out with a Lone Ranger comic book, a bicycle and several cans of condensed milk.
Jan 6, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Howard’s End Howard’s End
Martin Scorsese's The Aviator overlays three legends, all of them made of celluloid.
Dec 16, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans