Firefighter Ursa Cain has a lot to prove and in Danica Novgorodoff’s “Slow Storm,” you begin to wonder if she ever will. Ursa is the only female firefighter in a firehouse in Kentucky, constantly having to prove herself as good as any of the guys and particularly tortured by her own brother, who mocks her [...]
“Scrambled Ink” seems like an obvious attempt to duplicate some of the beauties of the Flight series by utilizing some top animators for sequential art side projects of a charming variety and for the most part it works wonderfully. Animation and comics are finding equal ground as the elevated ghetto apart from the film world, [...]
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, is there beauty in the destruction? The implication of “Encounters at the Edge of the World,” Werner Herzog’s new documentary, is that humankind, as the eyes and ears of the universe, is required for that perception. In evolutionary terms, the [...]
“Man On Wire” is the elegant telling of the particulars behind the legend of Phillipe Petit, the high wire artist who won fame by walking between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Built around interviews with the participants and accentuated by reenactments, the film is much more than a summation of [...]
Using the structure of a blues song as its own structure — and taking the kind of legendary subject matter of the music itself — “Bluesman” is both a a studied examination of the lives of blues performers in the 1920s and an infectious crime tale taking place within that sleazy underbelly.
Lem Taylor travels the [...]
In the first-rate science fiction mystery graphic novel “The Surrogates,” the latest craze for technology-hungry Americans is to have a surrogate — that is, an android body that goes out and lives your life for you while you sit around the house hooked up to it. The world presented by “The Surrogates” is a bleak [...]
Through books like “The Bear” and “The Snowman” Raymond Briggs has met with acclaim largely for books aimed at kids that have a dark edge to them. They stop short of actually being depressing, but the humor they disperse has a bite, peppered with an outlook that is not wholly sunny. Briggs has also branched [...]
In “Fireworks Wednesday” the latest of the evil empires to threaten the United States is revealed as a place filled with ordinary people experiencing the same ordinary problems as any characters in a latter-day Woody Allen film — just better than that. Much better.
In Tehran, on New Year’s Eve (March 21), bride-to-be Rouhi (Taraneh Alidousti) [...]
The Rapture has provided adventure fodder for those who believe in it — I’m looking at you especially, Tim LeHaye — as well as those who don’t. To the best of my knowledge, though, it’s never been depicted as anything other than exactly what is happening. God has taken all the Christians away to Heaven [...]
In this fable of the sea, Hugh is a fisherman whose relationship with the sea turns stormy after a personal tragedy. “That Salty Air” portrays not only a man who is enraged by the primal fury of the oceans that give him his bounty, but of the woman who must struggle against his rage — [...]
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