Arts & Culture

Gayle Crites and Andrew Beckham. As she usually does, Tina Goodwin has paired a couple of solos at her namesake gallery, with one in the larger front space and the other in the smaller corridor in back. At first glance, Gayle Crites: The Cloth That Binds appears to be an…

Basically a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to the female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is also a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, however, In Secret…

Two words uttered in the dark — “What happened?” — open The Square, Jehane Noujaim’s powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt’s struggle for meaningful change. Several documentaries on the country’s 2011 uprising, including Uprising and Tahrir: Liberation Square, rushed to answer that question, and suffered from a certain shortsightedness as a…

In If You Build It, a documentary about a high-concept high school product-design class in, of all places, rural North Carolina, director Patrick Creadon collects rich material but builds a rickety structure. The program is Studio H, led by two enterprising, idealistic architects who are brought to rural Bertie County…

No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…

It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter or an Internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past thirty years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or at least remake…

In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…

Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…