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Art Beat

by Shawn Stone November 29, 2012

THAT HOLIDAY FEELING As the late Andy Williams so memorably crooned, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” The State of New York gets into the holiday act this Sunday (Dec. 2) with the ...

Empire State Plaza

This riotously entertaining comedy finds its tears and laughter in the budding romance of a recently discharged mental patient (and violent felon) with a grieving widow who has been working out her sorrow by fucking ...

Fantastic Journey

by Ann Morrow November 29, 2012

Life of Pi launches with a terrifically exciting shipwreck that includes zoo animals, some of them large and carnivorous, with the human passengers desperately trying to survive the sinking of their ship in the middle ...

Ho Ho Ho

by Laura Leon November 29, 2012

I’ll admit, finding out that there was no Santa devastated me. I mean, coming across those bags of toys that could only be for me confirmed that I had been a very, very bad child. ...

Sexual Healing

by John Rodat November 20, 2012

The subject matter of The Sessions, the tale of a disabled man’s quest for physical intimacy, seems to promise melodrama. Paralysis may not constitute a genre, per se, but it is a powerful metaphor and ...

Toothless

by Ann Morrow November 20, 2012

The Cullens are not “real” vampires and neither are the members of the clans they enlist for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2. If you’ve seen any of the preceding films, you already know this, ...

The Presence of Greatness

by Laura Leon November 20, 2012

How to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln? What portion of a life, a presidency, an immense political footprint, would you focus on? These had to be questions director Steven Spielberg thought long and hard ...

Man Out of Time

by B.A. Nilsson November 20, 2012

The six-DVD set that Shout! Factory released last year was as wonderful a bounty of Ernie Kovacs material as you could desire, righting the wrong inflicted by an earlier collection that chopped his shows to ...

Licensed To Thrill

by Ann Morrow November 15, 2012

Grim. Sensationally grim. In Skyfall, part three of the Daniel Craig-James Bond reboot, 007 is hit by friendly fire and given up for dead. In the opening sequence. And that’s not even the heavy part. ...

Sins of the Script

by Laura Leon November 15, 2012

An uneasy cross between After Hours and Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Details charts the moral ambiguity of its protagonist, Dr. Jeff Lang (Tobey Maguire), as he confronts a seemingly endless pile of inconveniences and moral ...

Green Is Good

by Shawn Stone November 15, 2012

Revisionist tales that rewrite the back stories of famous works are darn near irresistible, from Wide Sargasso Sea’s Third World, feminist critique of Jane Eyre to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’s witty take on Hamlet. ...

Proctors

Reel Politics

by The Staff November 8, 2012

The Great McGinty No discussion of political flicks would be complete without Preston Sturges’ hilarious The Great McGinty. With this portrait of a classic pre-World War II big-city political machine, Sturges pulled off the impossible: an ...

A Graphic Process

by Elyse Beaudoin November 8, 2012

On Friday night, the Opalka Gallery spread out its usual crudité which serves as a centerpiece for art receptions ranging from student studies to renowned artists. This time the veggies and dip were surrounded by ...

Opalka Gallery

Party in Peace

by The Staff November 8, 2012

Here’s one of creature sculptor Jeff Brower’s monstrously wonderful creations as it was on view the evening of Oct. 27 at the Festival of the Dead, held Albany’s Washington Avenue Armory. Lenore Granich’s grand costume ...

Washington Avenue Armory

I Wish I Drove an Oscar Meyer Wiener

by The Staff November 8, 2012

The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile hot-dogged its way through the Capital Region last week, stopping by Albany Law School, an Albany Devils game at the Times Union Center and Saratoga Spa State Park. Here, on Nov. ...

Latham Holiday Inn

Going Down, Hard

by Laura Leon November 8, 2012

Any movie that begins with a visual panorama of flashing lighting, pouring rain and a rundown trailer park, set to the aural backdrop of a snarling junkyard dog and the expletive punctuated door pounding of ...

Zero To Hero

by Laura Leon November 8, 2012

I never liked video games or fell for the dubious allure of darkened arcades with their grubby joysticks and incessant backdrop of gaming techno-noise. Later, Pac-Man represented a welcome respite at restaurants from having to ...

Do It Again (and Again)

by Shawn Stone November 1, 2012

This cinematic lollapalooza from Run Lola Run’s Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis of Matrix fame is ambitious beyond any film in recent memory. Sprawling over three hours, Cloud Atlas tells six stories, spanning hundreds of ...

Real Kids

by Laura Leon November 1, 2012

A throwback to a more innocent time when films like Ordinary People, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Valley Girl and Sixteen Candles gave surprisingly realistic depictions of how kids lived in a pre-Internet-and-cell-phone America, Fun Sizeis a ...

A Tortured Muse

by B.A. Nilsson November 1, 2012

At the funeral of renowned conductor Pauletta Kripalova-Canti, the absence of her famous mezzo-soprano friend Alyssa is noted by several of Alyssa’s students, who summon the courage to query their instructor about it as a ...

Berkshire Museum

Bargain Bin

by Shawn Stone October 25, 2012

There’s only one DVD in this edition, but it’s a terrific find: Walt Disney’s 1944 love letter to South America, The Three Caballeros. As the fun begins, it’s Donald Duck’s birthday. The irascible quacker receives a ...

The Other Gamine

by Shawn Stone October 25, 2012

Audrey Hepburn personified the zeitgeist as the 1950s equivalent of today’s “pixie girl,” and generation after generation has continued to identify with her image. Yet the Dutch-born gamine did have rivals, and the best of ...

Small Groups, Big Sound

by B.A. Nilsson October 25, 2012

Perched as I was in a balcony seat, I easily could see the man in a house-right front row (pew, actually, this being Union College’s Memorial Chapel) dragging his overcoat up over his ears and, ...

Union College Memorial Chapel

Tragic Kingdom

by Shawn Stone October 25, 2012

God only knows what documentary Lauren Greenfield thought she would be making when she and her associates embedded themselves in the lives of billionaire time-share king David Siegel, his third wife Jacqueline Siegel and their ...

Rabbits Before Wizards

by Darryl McGrath October 25, 2012

Once upon a time, a British bureaucrat who had never published anything and who had no aspirations of being a novelist finally ceded to the pleadings of his little girls that he write down the ...

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