Movie Reviews

How 'Sound City' Changed The Face Of Rock 'N' Roll

11:26am February 12, 2013

by Kenneth Turan

Sound City is a documentary that came out of the Sundance Film Festival about a legendary recording studio in Van Nuys, California. It's a mash note to the Neve soundboard in the Sound City studios.

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Sports

Super Bowl Underdogs, Are Stats On Their Side?

11:26am February 12, 2013

by Mike Pesca

The Baltimore Ravens hope to top off their run to the Super Bowl with a win in the big game Sunday. If they do, they'll continue a trend of unlikely champions — six of the past eight Super Bowl victors weren't the top seeds in their conferences.

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Brutus (Salvatore Striano) fixes a wild stare at the witnesses and conspirators after Julius Caesar's murder, in a scene from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die.

Arts

'Caesar' Comes Alive In An Italian Prison

1:09pm February 08, 2013

by David Edelstein

In Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's new film, Caesar Must Die, a group of prisoners put on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's barely an hour and a quarter, and it's physically small-scale, but it's so compressed it wears you out — in a good way.

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The documentary The Gatekeepers examines Israeli security policy in interviews with six former heads of the secretive Shin Bet agency.

Arts

'Gatekeepers' Let Us Inside Israeli Security

10:24am February 01, 2013

by David Edelstein

The Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Dror Moreh is not a defense of Israeli security policy, but a critique. The six Shin Bet heads Moreh interviews may believe in the tactics they devised, but it's the overall strategy they think is flawed.

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'Fruitvale' Stands Out At Sundance

9:14am January 25, 2013

The Sundance Film Festival is underway in Park City, Utah. Fruitvale is based on an incident in which a young man was shot and killed by a BART police officer. His death triggered riots thorughout Oakland, Calif.

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Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and her sister, Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), are near-feral orphans in the horror thriller Mama.

Arts

'Mama': A Good Old-Fashioned Horror Movie

1:29pm January 22, 2013

by David Edelstein

In an age of werewolves, hormonal vampires and endless sequels, horror movies have lost some edge. But Mama, starring Jessica Chastain, is an entertaining step in the right — which is to say backward — direction.

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John Schlesinger's 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday has just been released on Blu-ray. The film's complex love triangle starred Peter Finch, Murray Head and Glenda Jackson.

Mozart's Starring Role In 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'

1:35pm January 07, 2013

by Lloyd Schwartz

The 1971 John Schlesinger film, recently released on Blu-ray, tells the story of a love triangle and makes moving use of a trio from the opera Cosi fan tutte as the film's musical theme.

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In Friends With Kids, Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) play two best friends who decide to have a baby together while keeping their relationship platonic — so that the baby doesn't interfere with their own romantic relationships.

Arts

David Edelstein's Top 12 Movies of 2012

2:47pm December 24, 2012

Fresh Air's movie critic does not think any masterpieces were made this year, but he does compare Daniel Day-Lewis to Julius Caesar and have some choice thoughts on the movie version of Les Mis.

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The Beatles look out of the Magical Mystery Tour coach skylight, on location in England in September 1967.

Behind The Scenes Of The Beatles' 'Magical Mystery Tour'

3:01pm December 14, 2012

by David Bianculli

A new documentary on PBS about the making of the Beatles' 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour features outtakes from the original and new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. TV critic David Bianculli calls the film "wonderfully thorough."

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Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) takes a fantastic adventure across Middle-earth in Peter Jackson's prequel to his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Arts

A 'Hobbit,' Off On His Unhurried Journey

8:01pm December 13, 2012

by Bob Mondello

Peter Jackson takes his audience back to Middle-earth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, set in a time before the Lord of the Rings films. NPR's Bob Mondello says that where the Rings films struggled with what to omit, The Hobbit labors to justify its three-hour running time.

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