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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Movie Reviews & Stories Cab Calloway: Sketches 60 Few musicians whom I grew up worshipping stand taller and prouder in my memory than Cab Calloway. With his big band swing-blues, his unconventional dance moves and his ree   More

Movie Reviews & Stories The 15th annual Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival starts on a poignant note this weekend—the fest’s best films are about...
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Movie Reviews & Stories The best scene in cancer comedy 50/50 is wordless: Newly diagnosed with a malignant nerve sheath sarcoma, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders the halls of a Seattle oncology ward stoned out of his gourd.    More

Movie Reviews & Stories Kidnapped76 Michael Haneke’s Funny Games was just a bit too touchy feely, don’t you think? And Gaspar Noé’s excruciating long takes in Irreversible were not quite excruciating and long enough,   More

Movie Reviews & Stories As of this writing, the Oakland Athletics (full disclosure: my Oakland Athletics), who have not posted a winning season since 2006, are 18 games out of first place in the American League West, a div   More

Movie Reviews & Stories The great German dervish Rainer Werner Fassbinder, still only 27 years old and already fairly deep into a frantic career of unceasing productivity—he seemed to know he would die young—dipped his   More