Mother knows best in Bong Joon-ho’s sinuous, first-rate whodunit, the South Korean director’s first feature since The Host in 2006.

Exquisitely played by Kim Hye-ja (an actress who spent decades in Korean minds as a TV mother), the title character coddles her unpredictable idiot of a son as if the 27-year-old were 7. They eat and even sleep beside each other until, one hazy night, he’s charged with the brutal murder of a poor high-school floozy. With her maternal instinct in overdrive, Mother conducts a town-wide probe to exonerate her child, leading to Hitchcockian suspense and a Pandora’s Box of repressed secrets.

Read More »

For nearly three years, Environmental Graffiti has provided fans of the offbeat and environmentalists with an online destination for inspiring, believe-it-or-not content.

Based in the UK, the site provides a range that is nothing short of stupendous, with posts on everything from bamboo architecture and the most psychedelic river on Earth (located in Colombia’s Sierra de la Macarena) to the long history of gunpowder weaponry. Eye-catching photo galleries and videos supplement fascinating lists, such as the 35 greatest works of reverse graffiti and the world’s most terrifying spiral staircases.

Read More »

A compelling polemic by Philly-based Don Argott, The Art of the Steal looks at the bitter, decades-long fight over the Barnes Foundation and its singular, $25-billion-dollar art collection.

Created in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, an early 20th-century industrialist and voracious art collector whose bio reads like Horatio Alger, the Barnes Foundation made its Merion, Pennsylvania home a mecca for aesthetes, with eyefuls of brand-name paintings (i.e. 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos) and only-here ephemera such as Native American ceramics. Barnes passed away in 1951, but his will declared that the works never be loaned, moved, or sold — that is until a few powerful figures in Philly saw the dollar signs in the impressionistic swirls.

Argott employs gabbing partisans, graphics, and archival footage to present a case that continues to open fault lines in the art world.

Read More »

With his Maurice Sendak opus Where the Wild Things Are set for DVD release on Tuesday, Spike Jonze took an evening to promote its splendid companion piece, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait Of Maurice Sendak, due out the same day courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories. The fleet, 40-minute documentary, which originally aired on HBO last fall, is all about the octogenarian Sendak, eliding conversations that Jonze and co-director Lance Bangs had at chez Maurice over the past couple of years. It feels like a running dialogue with the illustrator extraordinaire, engaging you with the this-and-that of a remarkable life (his childhood, his obsession with death and the Lindbergh baby, his late, half-a-century-long partner Eugene Glynn) as well as how the personal seeped onto the page.

Read More »

Copyright Criminals looks at the creative and monetary debates over musical sampling, mashing up music videos, studio visits, history, and talking heads including George Clinton and De La Soul.

The documentary on beat mining rounds up more issues than a town hall meeting, poring over everything from the best props for a sampled artist, to the basic merits and methods of the omnivorous art. The tone leans toward pro, with persuasive soundbites that liken sampling to archeology (the listener digs through the aural layers) and the democratic fact that “all these legendary musicians are in my band.” As Picasso once said: good artists borrow, great artists steal.

Read More »

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Or it may never have been at all. The “it,” of course, refers to Lars von Trier’s rumored remake of Taxi Driver, which had the media abuzz for nearly a spin around the sun. Often, the very mention of the word “remake” with a beloved title leads to a feisty chorus of “ohs” and “whys,” from The Seven Samurai to the more recent Let the Right One In. But with von Trier’s brilliant but checkered past (hit-miss-hit) and Martin Scorsese’s notorious “hero,” there was definitely promise for a must-see redo.

In that what-if spirit, here’s a list of other American classics and the directors we think could make them their own. Leave your own scenarios in the comments.

Read More »

OntheBoards.tv rescues innovative live performances from the ether with front-row video recordings that fans can purchase, rent, or stream with a low-cost subscription.

Started by the same-named artist-founded center in Seattle, this “performance on demand” service offers a slate of international creators at the vanguard of dance, theatre, and music. Already available are seven memorable productions from 2009, including Transition, a collaboration between director Tommy Smith and do-it-all Reggie Watts; The Shipment, Young Jean Lee’s trenchant play on race and culture; and Orgy of Tolerance, a consumerist pageant from name-brand Belgian Jan Fabre.

Read More »

Based on David Peace’s cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the ’70s and ’80s, Red Riding hits theaters as an anomic, must-see trilogy.

“Dickens on bad acid” is the phrase used by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to pithily describe the sprawling, paranoiac nature of the telefilms he wrote for Channel 4 in the UK. This inky triptych nears Bacon-esque nightmarishness and ravishment, with each part helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Together, Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (immersive widescreen) magnificently exhume a past in which the cutthroat police have a members-only toast: “To the North, where we do what we want.”

Read More »

Harry Dean Stanton and the blue-skied expanses of the Southwest can be seen in all their splendor in Criterion’s restoration of Wim Wenders’ open-hearted look at ’80s America.

Four years after abandoning his family, a haunted, laconic Stanton mysteriously appears in the desert. Reconnecting with his precocious seven-year-old son, he sets out to find his long-gone wife in Texas. The film’s sublime effect lies in how Wenders lets the journey unfurl, unhurriedly and moodily, with his outsider’s camera taking in everything from California suburbia to middle-of-nowhere highways.

Read More »

André Téchiné’s moody character study springs from a recent cause célèbre in France: a young woman’s trumped-up story of an anti-Semitic assault on a train.

The act itself is of less importance than the before-and-after for the ever-curious French director, who sections his societal and psychological probe of the scandal into “Circumstances” and “Consequences.” Throughout both, the camera drifts along with the spacey, superficially carefree Jeanne (a magnetic Emilie Dequenne) as she rollerblades around the sun-dappled purlieus of Paris; falls in amour fou with a would-be Olympic wrestler; spends dutiful time with mom Catherine Deneuve; and riles up the country with her troubling make-believe.

Read More »