Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine, which he’s directed in English, aspires to epic sweep and Tolstoyan grandeur. It runs almost three hours. But there’s still a breathless, hurried quality that doesn’t suit its many tangled dramas very well. The impeccably literate Hungarian director (best known in the United States for his 1981…
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.” Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from…
KKK Investments. Good morning. Can I interest you in fifty shares of Stars and Bars Flag and Pennant? No? Then how about Foreigner Detection Systems? If your mailman has relatives in Peru, or that fat monkey of a woman sitting next to you on the bus is from the former…
Literary critics often call Hamlet “the first modern man” because he’s preoccupied with the nature of self and the consequences of action. But in a spellbinding new take on Shakespeare’s great tragedy by independent filmmaker Michael Almereyda, the melancholy prince also takes on the trappings and attitudes of postmodern man…
You don’t have to know a spark plug from a socket wrench to enjoy a cold one at the Squeeze Inn. But it helps. Drop by this tiny northwest Denver nook — the name is perfect — and you find yourself submerged in the glories of car culture. The fender-smashing…
Brazilian moviemaker Bruno Barreto clearly has a taste for changing gears. In fact-based political thrillers like A Show of Force and Four Days in September, he casts himself as a second-string Costa-Gavras, rooting out state-sanctioned evil and the indiscretions of starry-eyed South American radicals. In his recent Hollywood period, Barreto…
Trumpeter Dave Douglas, jazz magazine cover boy and darling of the European jazz set, is multifaceted, to be sure. The introspective classicist can suddenly turn into a fiery post-bop improviser, and the eclectic composer can re-emerge as the all-out swinger. Soul on Soul marks the third time Douglas has paid…
How would this country’s motorheads react if the next three Daytona 500 winners were Romanians driving Russian race cars? What if an NFL expansion team from Amsterdam or Tokyo built a Super Bowl Dynasty? How many tickets would U.S. baseball nuts buy if the World Series featured the Toronto Blue…
The highfalutin’ soap opera in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
Greg Osby, a 39-year-old alto saxophonist with frantic tendencies, could not have chosen better company than his collaborators on The Invisible Hand. They include two disparate titans of jazz: the 69-year-old master guitarist Jim Hall and the endlessly innovative pianist Andrew Hill, who is now 62 but still pressing forward…
The favorite in this Saturday’s Kentucky Derby is a regally bred but half-crazy colt named Fusaichi Pegasus, and if you can pronounce his name, you’re doing better than most of the bourbon-soaked horse gentry decorating the saloons of Louisville. To be sure, Foos-ey-EE-chee, American-bred and Japanese-owned, is quite a runner:…
Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing, it’s now eighty years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and The Troubles…
The Cubs aren’t completely out of it yet, King Richard II continues to rule city hall, and hog jowl prices are holding steady at the Board of Trade. So life is good and spirits are high in Chicago — at least, in the stubborn little reminder of Chicago that has…
You can bet your last kopeck that newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin hasn’t so much as breathed Josef Stalin’s name while prosecuting an expensive war in Chechnya and setting his old secret-police comrades loose in pursuit of the new Russia’s capitalist bandits and money-launderers. In the former KGB agent’s…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
The recent explosion of Cuban music in the United States, provoked by Wim Wenders’s documentary film Buena Vista Social Club and a relaxation of the U.S. embargo on Cuban artists, has taken many joyful forms. For hardcore jazz fans, no one embodies that joy more than the extroverted pianist Jesús…
In Duffy’s Shamrock, a teeming downtown watering hole that has resisted change for almost four decades, the conversation is always changing. The adrenaline-crazed stock trader at your left elbow will discuss fluctuations in the NASDAQ until the place runs out of Jameson’s. But if baseball’s your thing, the retiree in…
The brilliant hard-bop trumpeter Woody Shaw went largely unsung in the course of his short, troubled life, but his work is now enjoying a welcome revival — thanks in large part to the efforts of the uncompromising reissue label 32 Jazz. In the last three years, producer Joel Dorn has…
In 2000, life among the Colorado Rockies remains a pennant or so short of bliss. National League batting champ Larry Walker recently went to Las Vegas, he reports, where he lost not only his money but his swing. Six games into the season he was hitting an un-Walkerlike .133. “Oh,…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Ghengis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
At least for the moment, the great (and greatly persecuted) Chinese film director Zhang Yimou has a new muse. Startlingly, she is a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who has never before appeared on-screen, but in Zhang’s new film, Not One Less, Wei Minzhi manages to carry most of the freight once borne…
In Stephen Frears’s new comedy High Fidelity, leading man John Cusack is forever looking the camera (and us) in the eye and explaining what’s wrong with him today, or why he was unhappy yesterday, or how his first girlfriend dumped him back in the seventh grade. Gazing into the lens,…
