Arts & Culture

2005 Based on a lesser known, but by no means any less pungent David Mamet play, “Edmond” is perhaps as close-to-the-bone as the playwright can get. A deceptively simple tale of a man who decides to embark upon a life-altering odyssey of debauchery, murder and madness, “Edmond” fairly explodes off the screen, featuring William H. […]

2001/2006 This lightweight seriocomic crime story from the Pang Brothers was released a year before their international success with “The Eye.” In it, a low-rent drug dealer named Bank (Pawarith Monkolpisit) meets a young hooker named Som (Wanatchada Siwapornchai) on the streets of Bangkok. They fall in love and he recruits her to help with […]

2006 With a premise taken straight from “Dateline NBC” (handsome 32-year-old guy ensnares uncomfortably mature 14-year-old girl via sexually suggestive Internet chats), director David Slade’s ickily effective “Hard Candy” can’t sustain the nerve-fraying tension of its early scenes, falling prey to blustery, breathless monologues as the film’s climax drags on. Despite its collapse in the […]

2006 Family”?friendly movies often get a bum rap, and deservedly so, for being exercises in blandness. Consequently, an exceptional family flick like “Akeelah and the Bee” is cause for real celebration. Keke Palmer portrays Akeelah, an 11″?year”?old girl growing up in the hardscrabble environs of South Central Los Angeles. Burdened with being smart and witty, […]

2006 Functioning as a sort of alternative history-cum-mockumentary, the fitfully lacerating and often painfully funny “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” begs the question: Had the South won the Civil War, would life today be that much different? It’s a discomfiting thought, one sure to inspire plenty of heated post-screening discussions.   Relying on faked […]

1954/2006 The full-blooded epic “Seven Samurai” ignited the imaginations of a generation of filmmakers, causing Akira Kurosawa’s signature work to be endlessly recycled, riffed upon and revisited in countless movies around the globe. Viewing it again, in this age of bombastic Hollywood action spectacles that teem with CG excess, it stands even taller as a […]

2005/2006 Sprawling, bloody and compulsively watchable, “Rome” is a lavish, lascivious spectacle which unfurls like a dozen mini-movies, each fraught with political intrigue, sizzling erotic encounters and gruesome combat that puts the glossy epics of Ridley Scott, et al to shame.   Transpiring during the final years of Julius Caesar’s (Ciar

  2006 Nearly 50 years since her radiant smile and razor-sharp bangs last graced a girlie mag, Bettie Page still holds an inexorable mystique over popular culture. Her “naughty but nice” persona “? the Fifties pin”?up queen was as comfortable projecting sunny sexiness as she was posing in bondage garb “? is at the heart […]

2006 Amid the journey from rap and hip-hop to the red carpet and Hollywood, one of the more promising personalities to make the switch is Tip Harris, better known in music circles as T.I. The Atlanta rapper stars in “ATL,” an engaging coming-of-age picture that successfully manages to rejuvenate a shopworn formula.   Harris plays […]

  2005 Billed as Singapore’s first “homegrown” horror movie, “The Maid” is an intriguing blend of ghost movie staples with superior acting and a fascinating background which will be unknown to most Western viewers. A pretty Filipina (Alessandra de Rossi) arrives in Singapore on the first day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, […]