Art Options for the Week of December 18

Ann Hamilton and Jae Ko et al. For Ann Hamilton: Selected Works, the initial enfilade of spaces at Robischon Gallery is taken over by works on paper by this noted conceptualist. The first group is from her “visite” series, the name of which is taken from the term “carte de…

The Interview Will Be Remembered for All the Wrong Reasons

Editor’s Note: Sony has officially canceled the theatrical release of The Interview following terrorist threats against theaters and the announcement that several major theater chains had opted not to exhibit the film. The following review was written before Sony pulled The Interview– and stands as a reminder that world-shaking art…

The Ten Best TV Shows of 2014

TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…

The Five Best Foreign Christmas Films

Christmas is a shared experience around many parts of the world. There are different traditions and celebrations, but whether it’s Joyeux Noël or Meri Kurisumasu, Christmas has central themes that we can relate to wherever we are. This year, put away the tired classics and opt for something with a…

Wild Stays True to the Spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Story

For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices, or their inner courage, or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on…

Netflix’s Marco Polo Is Everything That’s Wrong With Game of Thrones

Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence — cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy — Netflix’s Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site’s newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,…

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Project Reaches Its Spectacular End

The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…

Movies Podcast: Here’s Why We Love Chris Rock’s Top Five

We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a Thomas Pynchon story, before hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, move onto Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie adaption of his novel, Inherent Vice. It’s “in some ways a godawful mess, indulgent…

Five Christmas Movies to Make Your Skin Crawl

People prefer to ignore the seedy underbelly of Christmas, but to be honest, the holiday is inherently creepy. Think about it: a fat, old guy breaks into your house and leaves you presents that he mysteriously knows you want. We bring trees inside of our houses and decorate them with…

Art Options for the Week of December 4

Bob Knox and Michael Clapper. The William Havu Gallery is presenting simultaneous solos: Bob Knox: Real Abstract, which is made up of paintings, and Michael Clapper: Portals, which comprises sculptures. Knox is a New York artist; Clapper lives in Denver. The paintings mark various points of progression in Knox’s self-appointed…

HBO’s Getting On Is the Funniest Show You’re Not Watching

Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…

Sion Sono Asks: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Second in Japan only to Takashi Miike as an outrageously prolific and wicked genre geyser, Sion Sono is most notorious here for the four-hour teen-perv epic Love Exposure (2011). The cut-artery farce Why Don’t You Play in Hell is less typical, and a good deal goofier, riffing on yakuza films…