It’s been more than a decade since a new Lorrie Moore book has graced the bookshelves. A lot has changed since Birds of America took flight in 1998, but Moore’s trenchant, witty, and deeply wrought prose reemerges just as we remembered it; and while books not concerning boy wizards or teenage vampires are rarely events nowadays, Moore’s astonishing A Gate at the Stairs deserves to be fetishized.
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After the last fretted and beautifully-stylized episode in Flame and Citron, Ole Christian Madsen‘s name appears beside the Danish word for director: Instruktor. Even untranslated, it makes an apt descriptor for Madsen, who turns the true-life story of Danish resistance fighters during WWII into a compelling, noirish lesson on survival, heroism, and their heart-and-soul toll on the two heroes (superbly played by Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen).

Once an advocate of Dogme’s au naturel manifesto, Madsen sumptuously recaptures 1944 Copenhagen as a gloomy, pastel-tinted capital that’s rife with Nazis, collaborators, purgatorial carnage, misinformation, and curlicues of smoke that sit idly, if not seductively, in a tense atmosphere. Read More »

Park Chan-wook is renowned as the auteur of the brutal, which he presents with such pictorial flair that a sense of grandeur suffuses even his most macabre blindsides. The standard-bearer of Korean cinema (Old Boy, Lady Vengeance) returns in style — if not substance — with Thirst, another outré morality tale that follows a priest as he becomes a vampire and partakes in the Seven Deadly Sins. As Park describes, Thirst is a “scandalous vampire melodrama” that also happens to be darkly funny, creepy, spasmodically poetic, and frequently — for better and for worse — outrageous. Read More »

Editor’s note: This review originally ran during the Tribeca Film Festival. We’re re-posting it because the film opens in theaters nationwide today.

Moon is a collage of sci-fi cinema whose cut and paste pieces will be familiar even to those not comfortable dropping terms like Replicant or Sleestack into polite conversation. That’s not to say it lacks originality — there’s a star-cluster of clever twists and style — but Moon manages to find that magical middle ground where both zealots of the genre and newbies will feel satisfied to spend 90 minutes on board. With only one actor. Much of this has to do with Sam Rockwell, and the simple concept that gets pulled in a number of contortions that are easy to follow yet avoid the soap-opera-in-space-syndrome that plagues too many frames of contemporary sci-fi celluloid. Read More »

Last Friday, Long Island swelled with torrential rain showers as over 15,000 Phish fans (some with tickets and some without) descended upon the Jones Beach amphitheater to catch the end of the epic band’s three-night run in Wantagh. While the four hirsute band members brought joy into the hearts of their delirious and dancing fans, there was plenty to irk the unconverted. After the jump, a list of highlights for phans and non-phans alike. Read More »

As a Brit, I’m often proud that we manage to beat the Yanks when it comes to cultural progress: the subway, Baseball, gin and tonics… we were there first. To this end, I managed to catch the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London last summer, where I was bowled over by the range of work showcased (from the artist’s early sketches to his most famous masterpieces) and the detailed curation (personal letters, photographs, and information about his greatest influences and turbulent relationship with lover, George Dyer). Bacon’s work is haunting at best and confusing at worst, and this exhibition brings out the former whilst dispelling the latter.

Don’t trust the opinion of a posh English snob? Here’s what the critics had to say about Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, currently on view at the Met through mid-August. Read More »

At the outset of Olivier Assayas’ pensive and wonderfully impressionistic Summer Hours, grandchildren traipse around a restful, sun-dappled estate just outside the hectic reaches of Paris. The mood here is warm, conversational, and inviting. The villa belongs to 75-year-old Hélène (Edith Scob of Eyes Without a Face fame), a widow so aware of her dwindling days that she pulls eldest son Frédéric (an exemplary Charles Berling) aside during her birthday fete to go over the home’s litany of valuable objets d’art that have been present since the time of the past resident, Paul Berthier, an illustrious painter and Hélène’s uncle (a relationship perhaps a tad more amorous than avuncular). Included in the priceless inventory are two Corot landscapes, decorative Odilon Redon panels, an orchid desk by Louis Majorelle, and a few Félix Bracquemond vases — all paragons of 19th century French art. Read More »

One of the best films of the Tribeca Film Festival, Outrage places a spotlight on a long brewing political story that hasn’t been given sufficient attention from the mainstream media.  Lucky for us, Oscar-nominated director Kirby Dick is out to set the record straight…err, we mean gay. Read More »

The pains of being pure at heart are many in Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl, a moody, osmotic character study that thoroughly stresses the “awk” in youthful awkwardness. The American accompaniment to wife and co-director So Yong Kim’s In Between Days (both winking allusions to the same Cure single), Girl mirrors the former in its observational focus on best friends whose relationship lies in between platonic and romantic. The contemplative long takes, extended silences, and artless conversations also define the film as a well-done translation of the exquisite Taiwanese art of is-this-it patience (Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s Café Lumière is Gray’s cited inspiration).  Read More »

As much as you and I may geek out on the latest i-gadget, how many of us really take a moment to think about how rapidly technology will advance in our own lifetime? One of the most compelling documentaries at Tribeca this year, Transcendent Man, explores the profound and radical prediction of humans and technology merging by respected inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.  Read More »