Brew Views “If you want the ultimate, you have to pay the ultimate price.” It’s one of the many pearls of wisdom Patrick Swayze’s Zen-surfing/bankrobbing/skydiving/beach-footballing villain Bodhi s ... More

Brew Views Willem Dafoe hunts a rare tiger in the jungles of Tasmania? Sign me the fuck up! Like The Grey, whose trailer insinuated Liam Neeson would spend the movie killing wolves with his bare hands, a one ... More

Brew Views The best joke of Casa de Mi Padre is that it exists at all. Nearly entirely in Spanish, with Will Ferrell playing a Mexican ranching heir alongside Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, the film is ... More

Brew Views Let’s all take a moment to thank George Raft for The Maltese Falcon. Sure, he’s not actually in it—that’s why we’re grateful. The blank chorus boy with the tough-guy mug made a second ca ... More

Brew Views Earlier this year, the George Lucas-produced Red Tails tried (and failed) to tell the inspiring story of the Tuskegee Airmen by resurrecting the corny, flag-waving 1940s war picture—the exact ki ... More

Brew Views Essentially the Ramones’ A Hard Day’s Night, 1979’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School takes place in a parallel dimension to our own, a Bizarro World where preppy pretty boys pine after weirdo p ... More

Brew Views As if still fueled by all that nose candy at the end of GoodFellas, Scorsese’s desert follow-up Casino is the highest-grade Marty party, with all the tricks of his middle period deployed as ofte ... More

Brew Views Acolytes in the Church of Eastwood will tell you that Sudden Impact is not just the Dirty Harry movie that coined “Go ahead, make my day” for Reagan: No, it’s also the one Clint directed, an ... More

Brew Views Rod Serling was all about the heavy-handed allocation of ironic fate, so maybe it was inevitable that the Spielbergian bloat of Twilight Zone: The Movie would be punished by being remembered only fo ... More

Brew Views The story goes that when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, industry censors said his conclusion was too lenient toward organized crime. So he asked them to write the ending themselves, and th ... More

DVD & TV What can you divine about a television series from its pilot? Probably about as much as you can learn by looking at footprints in a muddy crime scene and determining the killer wore Timberlands. But ... More

DVD & TV I’ve got a confession to make: I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I should. I say “should” because when someone is being paid to write about television, there’s an expect ... More

DVD & TV An entertainment-industry trade paper recently ran a story with maybe the most depressing lead you could hope to find: “Sure, Michael Phelps has racked up more medals than any other Olympian in ... More

DVD & TV Generation Kill only makes sense if you’ve seen The Wire, but not quite for the reasons you’d expect. The Wire has now joined that short list of television shows whose titles are shorthand ... More

DVD & TV The premise for ABC’s Wipeout is pretty simple: Hearty Americans of slightly above-average looks and strength compete in an escalatingly dumb series of physical competitions designed to make the ... More

DVD & TV John Adams, which stars Paul Giamatti as a very grumpy Founding Father, is the kind of miniseries HBO excels at making, a sweeping historical epic that boasts an all-star cast, solid credentials on th ... More

DVD & TV NBC’s Quarterlife, a sitcom about those crazy kids and their blogs, has been booted from the network after just one episode and relegated to sister network Bravo. The explanation is a pretty sim ... More

DVD & TV I am now too old to get away with regularly watching MTV, which makes The Real World/Road Rules Challenge perfect for me. Let me explain. As did most people my age, I grew up not only watching MTV bu ... More

DVD & TV Watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do their shows in the midst of the Writers Guild strike is probably one of the most surreal viewing experiences I’ve ever had. And I don’t mean sur ... More

DVD & TV It pains me to have to put together this list, surely something more wistful and somber than you have any right to expect right after the onslaught of family and fruitcakes. But with talks between the ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Something is terribly wrong with the world when we’re getting a third Men in Black movie and still don’t know what happened after... More

Movie Reviews & Stories According to one expert in First Position, the keys to making it in the cutthroat world of ballet are “body, training, passion, personality.” Freshman director Bess Kargman manages to find s ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Even in a town known for incubating distinctive animation talents, Portland-born Bill Plympton is special. Not only is he one of the most iconic animators currently working—his work is recogniza ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Experimental media in Portland is fractured. If that meant abstruse, mind-splattering and totally fucking bonkers, it’d be a good thing. But it’s more literal. In the last three years, the loc ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Richard Linklater’s new movie contains all the “outrageous” elements obligatory to deadpan, small-town true crime. Nice-guy killer? Meet Bernie Tiede, hymn-singing assistant mortician with ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories It’s fitting that the flagship offering of the sixth annual Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival is Jeffrey Schwarz’s Vito (7 pm Sunday, May 20), a eulogy for the man who documented the depi ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Tim Burton takes a lot of guff. Admittedly, much of it is justified. Any director brazen enough to think the world was clamoring for a mall-goth interpretation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories A high point of nerve-wracked Norwegian thriller Headhunters finds its protagonist, a corporate recruiting agent named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), desperately navigating a rain-slicked road on the ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories Tract houses and taupe shag carpeting: For the tight few opening minutes of Sound of My Voice, this is the mundanely hellish world of the modern cult. Peter and Lorna (Christopher Denham and Nicol ... More

Movie Reviews & Stories In helming The Avengers—the long-awaited convergence of four Marvel Comics properties into one gargantuan nesting doll of a summer blockbuster—Joss Whedon is burdened with glorious purpose. ... More

Screen This is the way the world cinema showcase ends: not with a whimper, but with mutilated clowns and schoolgirls with robotic claws. The Portland International Film Festival doesn’t let its foot off ... More

Screen Gephyrophobia: the fear of crossing bridges. This malady has longed plagued the eastside cinephile during the Portland International Film Festival. But not this year. In its second week, PIFF jumps ... More

Screen My first favorite movie was Follow That Bird. It starred my favorite actors at the time—a 6-foot, yellow-feathered puppet named Big Bird and his cohorts Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Snuffleupagus—p ... More

Screen There’s no mistaking it: Like any good regional importer looking to tap into economic recovery, the 34th annual Portland International Film Festival is diversifying. For the first time, PIFF is exp ... More

Screen Rome’s lost Legio IX Hispana, maybe massacred in Britain around 117 A.D., is suddenly a hot commodity: The Eagle is the second movie in six months about the legion’s shrouded fate, following Neil Marshall’s viscera-spattered Centurion ... More

Screen Africa is not a continent terrifically well known for its cinema: The money isn’t really there, and many of its countries are constantly in violent flux. But that very instability and unfamiliarit ... More

Screen Rage 45 [ONE NIGHT ONLY] With eye-popping cinematography and a searing score, Rage ranks among the most richly produced local films in recent memory, but also among the most disappointing. Early on, ... More

Screen A burst of jazz announces the place as 1950s London, where elderly author J.R. Ackerley begins typing a memoir. From his cozy apartment, ... More

Screen Crispin Glover may be popularly known for playing inarticulate (or completely silent) characters, but he has a lot to say. He returns to Portland this week with his two movies, What Is It? (which star ... More

Screen After months of breathlessly anticipating the chance to watch Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s comedy series Portlandia, it is suddenly difficult to find a place where people ... More