Archive for December, 2024
Art
Lottery League is a large-scale recurring experiment that brings together diverse Cleveland musicians and forces them to form new bands on the spot with people they definitely have never played with and may never have even met ...
Movie
“Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on?” Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) says on more than one occasion in the new crime drama Broken City. Audiences will find themselves asking the very same question. The film bein...
Movie
Well, he said he’d “be back.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, alright, delivering those simple-minded one-liners with an accent as thick as always in The Last Stand, a new action film that picks up where all his crappy actio...
Movie
For the first 90 minutes, Rust and Bone is stereotypical art house fare. The French-Belgian film centers on Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer who has both legs cut off in a terrible accident. We see her hit rock bot...
Album Reviews
From the hypnotizing double entendre “Ohm” throughout the rest of the album, Fade is the work of a self-assured, comfortable – but never complacent – group of musicians. Yo La Tengo keeps challenging itself (working...
Q&A
Founded in 1973, Kronos Quartet has been dubbed the most famous new music ensemble in the world and amassed hundreds of works. It’s crossed over into the pop and rock worlds, too, playing music from avant garde singer Laurie An...
Movie
Not be confused with the Wayans brothers’ superior Scary Movie franchise, A Haunted House aims its satire at Paranormal Activity. And, like Paranormal Activity, it pretends as if it’s a homemade movie documenting the strange go...
Movie
It’s not hard to miss the controversy at the core of Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s (The Hurt Locker) drama about the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. The movie opens with a scene in which CIA agent Dan (Jason Clarke)...
Movie
Based on Paul Lieberman’s Tales from the Gangster Squad, Gangster Squad has a good premise. It centers on Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), an ex-boxer who’s trying to be the main mob boss in L.A. in 1949. So ruthless that he chains a ...
Q&A
On Love Sign, Philadelphia indie rockers Free Energy so shamelessly draw from ’70s classic rock that frontman Paul Sprangers admits a track like “Time Rolls On” sounds like it could have been something in his father’s record co...