getting people to see united 93

Entertainment Weekly 's Owen Gleiberman is only scratching the surface of a worthy debate, but he raises a good point about the so-call...

avoid rv ...

... you'll thank me later.

on my wedding day

In the three years I've been dating my wonderful girlfriend/fiancee/bride-to-be, I've consulted an essay entitled " The Road Ta...

god bless doonesbury

Who needs to spend time criticizing the Bush administration when Gary Trudeau can do it for us in eight perfect panels ?

calexico

On their latest album, Garden Ruin , the Tucson band get as political as you can while still writing lilting, acoustic ballads. Or so says I...

kurt cobain has now been dead for 12 years

On the anniversary of the Nirvana frontman's suicide, I decided to go back and re-read this piece from The Black Table . Several writer...

yes, billy joel

It'll break my dad's heart, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't find much nice to say about Billy Joel in this recent piece .

she wants revenge

I love them, I hate them, I don't know what to do with them .

a movie world before dvd and multiplexes

Peter Bogdanovich risks sounding like the grumpy old man who always complains how great things used to be back in his day, but his defense ...

loving the imperfect: the cultish devotion to malick's the new world

"Not everyone adores The New World ," J. Hoberman writes in The Village Voice , "but those cineastes who like it, really, rea...

the real reason crash won, part 894

James Bates does a commendable job going beyond the angry accusations to lay out a very calm, logical explanation for Crash 's win at t...

a conservative or an ideologue?

Professor Jeffrey Hart makes an important distinction between these two terms in his piece on President Bush, arguing that our current admi...

living in robert altman's los angeles

At long last, the man is finally getting his Oscar. I do my best to praise his representation of the city I love.

unknown white male

I've been a fan of Rupert Murray's documentary since last year's Los Angeles Film Festival. Now it's finally receiving its t...

islam and you

Brendan Bernhard's piece in the LA Weekly does a great job of discussing the recent rash of violence propagated by some radical Islamis...

sick of los angeles traffic?

Fans of The Simpsons can't hear the word "monorail" without laughing ... some of us even remember the words to the song in th...

long may he run

Neil Young, that is. Jonathan Demme's fine new concert film about the man heads up my latest Consumables .

hating (but understanding) american idol

Thomas de Zengotita's excellent piece on the allure of American Idol comforts all of us who hate that show by agreeing with our complai...

writing about the wu-tang clan

I can't imagine how current teenagers could have any understanding of what a talented (and often hilarious) outfit the Wu-Tang Clan were...

Top Ten Movies of 2005

I've been meaning to put this up for a few weeks now. Let the mild debate begin. 10. King Kong Some movies have such tremendous upside t...

manderlay: even so-so lars von trier is pretty good

I loved Dogville so much that I both feared and kinda looked forward to the second installment in Lars von Trier's "U.S.A." t...

pazz & jop

The Village Voice 's annual music poll, Pazz & Jop, brings together close to 800 music critics to vote for their favorite albums and...

farewell to chris penn

An actor in search of a defining role, Chris Penn came closest to greatness with his understated performance in Robert Altman's Short Cu...

there goes your favorite local record store

With a nice mixture of music-geek purity and acute business sense, Tanveer Badal reports on the final days of a Los Angeles institution, Aro...

bubble

You don't always have to agree with a critic to appreciate his perspective on a film. Take Bubble , a movie that I think works more as a...

music as more than just something to pass the time

Sometimes reading a glowing review about a piece of work is more colorful and evocative than experiencing the actual work itself. I still re...

why nobody has heard of hou hsiao-hsien or jia zhangke, part two

The recent redesign of the LA Weekly website has made it a little tricky to find a lot of archived articles at the moment, but thankfully I ...

why nobody has heard of hou hsiao-hsien or jia zhangke

Recently, a friend's father lamented that today's cinema has no Bergman, no Fellini, no Antonioni. Where, he wondered, were all the ...

a great start to 24

Glowing reviews of Kiefer Sutherland's hit show, Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine , and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada ...

glory road

Another January, another inspirational true-life basketball story. Here's my review of Glory Road .

springsteen, without cliches

Bruce Springsteen is such an instutition -- more icon now than man -- that it's hard for a reviewer to judge anything beyond the mystiqu...

two takes on munich

Mine . And David Thomson's .