IT ALWAYS COMES down to this: Movies you must experience versus movies that threaten to diminish you. That’s the point of making a Better-Than List rather than pretending that the typical over-hyped product constitutes a consensus of worthwhile movies. Most of these high-profile films insult one’s intelligence, while the year’s best movies vanish from the marketplace for lack of critical support. Th...

DJ Rob Hitt wasn’t bullshitting when he named his weekly Tuesday night bash at Angels and Kings “Trainwreck.” If you don’t mind The Real World’s Baya Voce and her po-faced DJing apprenticeship, there’s a late open bar followed by a $5 whiskey special. I made it through the open bar but was buckling when some new acquaintance, home on break from college, held a shot of Jameson under...

JEAN COCTEAU ONCE SAID, “Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” Bear this in mind as iconic artist and designer Stephen Sprouse—famous for his graffiti-covered garments, vampire-themed fashion shows and futuristic vision—is reintroduced to the world this week by way of...

First, let’s say so me thing good so this article can say something at all: The Passing Strange soundtrack, the Repo! The Genetic Opera soundtrack, Joe Jackson’s Rain, Electric Six’s Flash, that self-titled one from Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, Black Mountain’s In The Future, Murder By Death’s Red of Tooth and Claw, Alice Cooper’s Along Came A Spider, and…well, there was th...

“GOD—YOU MUST watch way too much porn,” I told my date. It was three in the morning on New Year’s Eve, and I was in a strange bed in Long Island City, naked and disappointed. And our second date had started out so well. New Year’s Eve was a strange night to have a second date, sure, but after my first date with John had ended on a chilly December evening with evidence that he was a great...

IN GRAD SCHOOL at Columbia, we were able to study a private print of Jean- Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. Never theatrically released in America, its scarcity made it special, so I watched it repeatedly. It was one of the experiences that made me unafraid of movie art; drawn-in by Godard’s dense narrative and thrilled by its Cinemascope colors.The story of Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) searching a town called A...

WHAT DO YOU get when you combine punk rock,Vaudeville cabaret, modern technology and a greatly misunderstood character actor from America’s golden age of film? Everyone agrees:You get a bad idea. Specifically you get Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century. Conceived as “a hybrid punk rock multi-media theater event,” the piece presents Lorre’s dramatic life story through music...

Holocaust denial is a universally reviled sin, but the status of Holocaust embellishment offers a debatable conundrum. The issue arose last month when genuine Buchenwald survivor Herman Rosenblat reve