Movie Reviews & Stories Most of us see the world through American eyes, contextualizing modern political struggles through selective memories. Whether consuming news from Libya, Iran or Occupied Portland, it’s impossibl   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Gil Reyes isn’t sure what to expect when he finally screens his 2009 film, Searching for Elliott Smith, in Portland on Friday, eight years after the singer’s death.   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Jeff Nichols’ sublime Take Shelter is a trenchant, contemporary American horror story, which means it is not about ghosts or demons but waiting for the other shoe to drop. More specifically, it   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Chicogrande 38 [MEXICO] The 41st film of 74-year-old Mexican auteur Felipe Cazals is a deeply silly western loosely inspired...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories The existence of The Big Year is a sign of something diseased and possibly irreparable in our society. Watching it I felt, for the first time this month, a distinct urge to occupy something. This i   More

Movie Reviews & Stories In contemplating Clarence Reid’s career touring the world as septuagenarian soul singer/rap inventor/pussy lover Blowfly, it’s hard not to think of a tired old circus lion. Occasionally he roars   More

Movie Reviews & Stories A Star Is Born 35 A Star is Born is like a Serbian episode of MTV’s Made. Vanja Kovacevic, who wrote, directed, edited and produced this documentary, wants to become a drummer. The Decemberists ar   More

Movie Reviews & Stories It is not uncommon for a great artist to show questionable taste in source material. Bob Dylan recorded a Christmas album in which he gurgled “Here Comes Santa Claus.” T.S. Eliot developed a poe   More

Movie Reviews & Stories If politics is the art of the possible, art about politics is an inventory of the most appalling possibilities. The taint of compromise—the incremental moral-compass adjustments that have despoile   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Real Steel is fundamentally a bad movie—obnoxious, incoherent and sloppy—resembling nothing so much as some ’90s summer family-film commodity fabricated to sell toys: Rock ’Em  Sock
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