Tower Heist is one of those movies whose duration seems allusively equivalent to the time required for researching and pondering the previous credits of its several screenwriters, who are collectively responsible for cheeky caper flicks of widely varied pedigree.
The verse of Rita Dove has allowed her to traverse territorial boundaries and epochs of time, meditating on everything from the life of 18th-century violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower to Rosa Park’s 1955 protest in Montgomery, Alabama.
When Dr. Ralph Stanley and His Clinch Mountain Boys played the Mockingbird Roots Music Hall in Staunton, Virginia back in August of this year, tickets sold out fast. After all, it isn’t every day that lovers of old-time mountain music get the opportunity to see a performer as celebrated as Ralph Stanley in a listening […]
“Hell on Wheels” Sunday 10pm, AMC Those still lamenting the loss of the late, great HBO Western “Deadwood” might want to give this new offering from AMC a try. This basic-cable channel, currently riding high on the massive success of zombie thriller “The Walking Dead,” continues to take chances with a series set in the […]
In The Rum Diary, a suavely scruffy American novelist (Johnny Depp) takes a reporting gig at a shabby newspaper in Puerto Rico, where he contends with various kooky colleagues (Michael Rispoli, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi), a smug and greedy land developer (Aaron Eckhart), a luscious love interest (Amber Heard), and several angry locals. Also, he […]
The weather on Mt. St. Vincent is ruled by inconstant winds. In the songs that Annie Clark makes as St. Vincent, somber verses are never more than a lyrical twist away from sardonic, and anxiety seethes at the edges of even the most cheerful baroque pop moments. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, known onstage as […]
“Strange visitor with assimilation challenge shakes up status quo.” We could be talking about Footloose. But instead it’s The Thing, another recently refreshed early ’80s movie memory. It’s a timelessly simple story: Researchers in Antarctica discover a hostile shapeshifting extraterrestrial in their midst—and hoo boy, can this thing dance! No? O.K. For now, being able […]
“Beavis and Butt-head” Thursday 10pm, MTV First “Pop-Up Video,” now “Beavis and Butt-head”—the ’90s are alive and well on basic cable. The original “Beavis and Butt-head” ran on MTV from 1993 to 1997, a crudely animated show following two tasteless Texas high-schoolers who pepper their sociopathic outings with critiques of music videos. The cackling-idiot duo […]
Drive is a movie about sexy people and cars. Or maybe not cars, per se, but the experience of being in them, with sexy people. As such, it is ridiculous, but not in the way you’d expect: It’s neither all that fast nor especially furious. Oh sure, there is some grisly gun violence, and a […]
American violinist Hilary Hahn has been a mainstay of the celebrity-soloist circuit since 1991, when she made her major orchestral debut at the age of 15. Over the last decade, Hahn has twice been awarded the Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra, and in 2010, a piece she commissioned from composer Jennifer Hidgon […]