Austin City Limits Music Festival
January 10, 2006
Austin City Limits has been a staple on public television for several decades. It has always provided a venue for musical acts from all over the world and in all kinds of genres. Known early on for championing country, blues and rockabilly, the show has...
The Phantom of the Opera
November 12, 2005
It’s amazing that it took this long for a film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous Broadway musical The Phantom of the Opera to be made. While it was seen by millions upon millions of people worldwide, the movie failed to draw in the big numbers...
Beyond the Sea
November 4, 2005
Insightful biopic or bloated vanity project? That’s what audiences and critics were asking themselves when Kevin Spacey’s labour of love, Beyond the Sea (2004), a dramatization of the life and times of legendary crooner Bobby Darin, came out. Since...
The American Astronaut
August 20, 2005
The American Astronaut (2001) is the missing link between Guy Maddin and the early films of David Lynch. Cory McAbee’s movie is shot in glorious black and white film stock with unabashedly lo-tech special effects that reside at the opposite end of the...
The Martin Scorsese Film Collection
August 10, 2005
Martin Scorsese is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers living today. At first, this may seem like so much over-inflated hype, and to be sure, he would be the first to avoid this title, but think, for a moment, about a handful of the films this...
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
August 7, 2005
Most documentaries on musicians rarely rise above the level of an episode of VH1’s Behind-the-Music. They are either self-congratulatory puff pieces or tabloid fodder that dwells mostly on salacious aspects. Granted, the recent documentary, Dig (2004)...
Garage Days
December 6, 2004
Alex Proyas is known primarily for making big budget, high concept action films like The Crow (1994), Dark City (1998) and the recent I, Robot (2004). This is why his little seen Garage Days (2002) is something of a curious anomaly. It is a low-budget...
Tupac: Resurrection
September 23, 2004
Tupac: Resurrection (2003) is an attempt to tell the legendary rapper, Tupac Shakur’s life story in his own words. This may seem difficult considering he’s dead but Lauren Lazin’s documentary manages to pull it off. She achieves this by editing...
Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman)
January 1, 2004
Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961) is a playful battle of the sexes. It pushes the musical genre far out into exciting new directions that still seem ahead of its time. Angela (Karina) is an exotic dancer who wants to have a child with...
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School
December 2, 2003
Hey Ho! Let’s Go! Listen up, kids. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School may have been released way back in 1979 but it still kicks the ass of any of those square MTV movies. Forget about Britney Spears and Mandy Moore’s brand of bubblegum...
