Category: Magazine

● by Ethan Sandweiss

On January 7th at 11:30, I was finishing my language class at Lyon’s Alliance Francaise.  Less than three hundred miles away, the employees of one of France’s premier satirical magazines were being slaughtered.

Despite the rise of terrorism all over the world, France has, up until the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office, remained remarkably untouched. I’m working in Lyon as an au pair, but when I first heard about the attack (through my American family), it seemed far off and small, as if in another country. Being a foreigner here, it’s sometimes hard for me to gauge Read more

● by Craig J. Clark

As any self-respecting cinephile can tell you, the Criterion Collection is an invaluable and expertly curated resource for anybody looking to be a well-rounded movie-lover. Releasing dozens of films a year (at the rate of 6-8 a month with the occasional boxed set thrown in for good measure), there’s never a shortage of goodness to be had on Criterion’s slate. (This also includes their periodic Blu-ray upgrades, which often come with new supplements that weren’t included on the original releases.)

Before we get too far into 2015 (which is yielding its own crop of must-buys, including Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer), I’d like to highlight a dozen of their best titles from 2014 – one for each month. Read more

● by Chris Lynch

Students in Indiana University’s theater department will premiere a new production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, directed by professor Nancy Lipschultz, on February 27. According to the director, “Our approach is totally traditional this time. I’m not really known for that. I’m known for mixing it up and doing things like Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Jay Z, but this time we’re going late Renaissance. The stage is sort of a replica of [Shakespeare’s] Globe stage, the costuming traditional, and there will be traditional music—lute, drums, mandolin, and some singing of lullabies and Elizabethan drinking songs at the beginning.” Lipshcultz felt that “it might be nice to have the students do a full-on late-Renaissance Romeo and Juliet without, you know, adding the Dixie Chicks.” Read more

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and the Iranian Vampire Western ● by Tom Prasch

Alone in her room, dancing by herself in a windowless, barely furnished space, walls papered with vintage-feeling (80s-ish) pop posters , with her pixie-cut hair and striped shirt, the girl seems to be channeling Jean Seberg ala Godard, back when the nouvelle vague was still new. But when she dons the black chador to go out into the streets, prowling the menacingly empty desolate night spaces of her oil-industrial city, she becomes something else: a dark-clad vampire who mirrors the movements of her prey before her incisors snap forward like a switchblade and she goes in for her kill. Read more

● by Jamie Gans

Much like the Blues and Appalachian music, the Celtic roots revival began to re-sprout within its own cultural and ethnic regions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany by the late 1950’s. Over those past fifty plus years the music has expanded its boundaries throughout the world. On both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, musical tradition and innovation continue to thrive from Kentucky old time to Gaelic sean-nós. Here are some recent releases that represent the best in Celtic roots. Read more