Pictureland

At a certain point, Frank, the man in the very large papier mache head, shows up at South By Southwest, the annual Austin, Texas festival of music, film and general hipness, as it seems he must. During the brief glances we get of Frank's band, Soronprfbs (don't try to pronounce it), milling amongst the other SXSW performers and attendees, there is a brief, amusing, two-person, street summit of bodies beneath large, fabricated noggins.  These big heads seem to tilt slightly in recognition, as if echoing souls from a distant, disproportionate realm who have found a fellow traveler. While the fleeting, amusing encounter might seem to present but two characters adding flavor to the human stew about them, there's no reason to believe they're at all the same.  The square, crudely-rendered, television-like head staring back at Frank is probably little more than a band's temporary gimmick, perhaps a festival attendee's costuming lark.  For Frank, the oblate dome at...

Like the Holocaust, America's woeful history of slavery tends to be looked upon in monolithic terms.  A colossal, calculated, horrible example of man's inhumanity to man.  A grievous monument of hatred and brutality beyond, for some at least, words and comprehension.  But as with the Holocaust, about which new stories seem to emerge yearly, America's slave history has produced many and disparate narratives. One such story was that of Solomon Northup. After being lured to Washington D.C. for some brief but lucrative work, Mr. Northup, a free man who lived with his family in upstate New York, was drugged and awoke to find himself in chains.  When he protested that he was a free man, he was brutalized for the first of what would be many occasions in the succeeding dozen years.  Northup endured a slave's life in various Louisiana plantations until his whereabouts were finally discovered by family and friends, thanks to a friendly emissary, Canadian carpenter Sa...

If you close your eyes during Steven Soderbergh's Haywire , you might think yourself at a screening of one of his "Oceans" films, or even last year's slightly scary but ultimately uninvolving Contagion .  Unless your period of darkness happens to coincide with one of many intervals during which grunts are issued, bodies and objects are heard to crash, like aural exclamation marks, all telltale sounds of asses being kicked by the film's heroine, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano).  Otherwise, there is a good bit of slinky electronica provided by composer David Holmes, the man responsible for the soundtrack of the three "Oceans" films.   Contagion's soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, while a little harder-edged, pulsated with a similarly synthesized score, its background music much closer to the dance floor than the concert hall. With their modern music sensibilities and and travelog tendencies, Oceans 11 , 12 and 13 , along with Contagion and Haywire , are...

In glancing at a few reviews prior to seeing A Dangerous Method , I recall one that noted audiences  finding the film "too talky."  While this seems tantamount to finding The Artist a tad too silent, it does point out the difficultly facing David Cronenberg and his accomplished screenwriter, Christopher Hampton (adapting his 2002 play, The Talking Cure, based on the novel by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method:  the story of Jung, Freud and  Sabina Spielrein ).  Just how do you create something cinematic about the early days of psychoanalysis and a few of its leading figures?  Do you attempt to flesh out these extremely complex historical figures and do justice to most of the intellectual issues with which they grappled, at the risk of producing something that is too...well, clinical?  Or do you go the more florid, Ken Russel route with these august personages?  Freudomania, anyone? A kind of middle ground is achieved,which goes back to Mr. ...

"What's your tale of woe?  All  governesses have their tale of woe."  If you're at all familiar with Jane Eyre, you know that she's got a doozy.   But when the stern Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) asks this of his relatively new governess, she downplays her woeful backstory.  One of the great strengths of this latest Jane Eyre, written by Moira Buffini and directed by Cary Fukunaga, is that it too downplays some of the Gothic excess inherent in Charlotte Bronte's novel.  This allows for a better focus on one of the great heroines of 19th-century literature, who sometimes is lost amidst the privation and suffering of her youth and the dramatic goings-on at Thornfield Hall - you know, the brooding guy with the crazy wife in the attic.   All the better that Jane be played by Mia Wasikowska.  The lovely young actress ( The Kids Are Alrig ht, Alice in Wonderland ) has had her hair dyed red and...