Does anybody else ever get the niche culture blues? We have all the choice we could want now in our fragmented, high-tech pop culture, but it's very, very difficult for anything -- especially a  

Persepolis arrives in Cincinnati as a cause celebre within the art-film community. This animated feature, adapted by Marjane Satrapi from her autobiographical graphic novels about life in post-Is  

Woody Allen obviously knows Greek history, or at least Greek theater, and its mythology. Mighty Aphrodite (1995) was permeated with it, including Greek choruses at Greek ruins. Ten years later, Mel  

Jean-Jacques Beineix's classic Diva, now being re-released in a gorgeous new 35-millimeter print, is one of the coolest, most visually compelling art movies ever made. That it also works well as  

Paul Thomas Anderson's flawed yet fascinating There Will Be Blood is an epic, supremely strange period piece that evokes a host of current cultural issues: our obsession with oil, the role of re  

The whole point of art, really, is to experience the world as others see it. Few artists have taken that imperative as literally, yet at the same time so poetically and imaginatively, as Julian S  

Top 10 movie lists are both amusing and agonizing endeavors -- worthy fare inevitably gets excised due to the constraints of the conceit. It´s even more problematic in a year such as 2007, w  

It was another decidedly melodic year in film. With the movie musical resurrected -- thank you forebears Chicago and Moulin Rouge -- and seemingly not going anywhere, and with more writers, direc  

The massive success of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) transformed Keira Knightley from a little-known British actress to a figure worthy of glossy magazine covers and s  

The maturely humane, rueful tone of director/writer Tamara Jenkins' comedy The Savages, about the confused grown children of an elderly man facing dementia, is akin to Alexander Payne's About S  

Director Tim Burton's screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1979 Grand Guignol musical is at once mesmerizing and disappointing. Outstanding singing performances from its capable ensemble ca  

One of the fault lines of modernism has always been Abstract Expressionism. Those who just don't get the intellectual concept behind it -- that painting is about color (or the lack of it) as muc  

The Hollywood dream factory shifts into a slightly different gear this holiday season, as it becomes a subsidiary of the publishing houses. Apparently there is box-office gold to be mined along   

The crisis in the parched, drought-prone Darfur region of Sudan -- where Arab militias known as Janjaweed ("devils on horseback") have been massacring and displacing African civilians in order t  

Eighty-three-year-old director Sidney Lumet is a genuine American Master -- his career includes classic live television dramas of the 1950s as well as such outstanding, naturalistic cinematic inv