Vanishing on 7th Street
A solid little indie horror flick by Brad Anderson, Vanishing on 7th Street is quick on its feet and the director proves adept at creating some real scares on a stripped-down budget. Although there are some strong performances, notably from John Leguizamo, the quality of the cast is uneven, and the script fails to take the audience all the way through the picture, which loses its way badly and often finding itself marooned in cheap, thoughtless genre territory and culminates in a vastly disappointing denouement.
Amalia
A story based on the life of Portuguese singer Amalia Rodrigues, an exponent of fado, a kind of Portuguese flamenco. It never does justice to its wonderful material. Director Carlos Coelho da Silva goes for a glossy portrayal of Amalia’s mostly unfortunate romantic entanglements through the 1950s and 1960s, with only a passing concern for her enduring musical legacy, which both revived the traditional fado form and defined how it should be performed. Pretty pictures, including the beautiful Sandra Barata Belo as the title character, and snippets of Amalia’s music almost make this film worthwhile.
The Music Never Stopped
Based on Oliver Sacks’ essay The Last Hippie, this movie by first-time director Jim Kohlberg fails to realize its very considerable potential as a meditation on the power of music in our lives. A story about a boy who walks out on his family and is rediscovered two decades later suffering from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. Father (JK Simmons) and son (Lou Taylor Pucci) need to find a way of bonding. Enter a music therapist played by Julia Ormond, and an inspirational (and oddly drug free) Grateful Dead concert, and The Music Never Stopped sinks into a gelatinous goo of nostalgia for a time when rock ’n’ roll mattered.
Passion Play
After his wonderful comeback in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke continues to demonstrate his massive talent for picking turkeys. In Passion Play he co-stars with Megan Fox and Bill Murray, one of the oddest lineups for some time. Rourke is a jazz musician, inevitably on the fringe, who meets an angel, the improbably cast Fox. Mobster Murray wants a piece of the action. The possibility of some mildly entertaining B-movie titillation is utterly destroyed by writer/director Mitch Glazer’s pretensions that he is another Wim Wenders.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
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