1976 San Diego guide to surfing spots Tamarack, Swami's, Black's, Windansea, Ocean Beach, Needle's Eye, Ralph's, Tijuana Sloughs 1976 San Diego guide to sailing Mission Bay, Navy Sailing Club, Southwestern, Silvergate, Seaforth, Coronado and San …
1973 San Diego guide to cheap eats How to eat on a dollar a day 1973 San Diego guide to rock music Best clubs 1973 San Diego guide to movies Grim harvest 1973 San Diego …
Roommates from Hell I walked outside to the storage door. I pushed on the door and opened it. I saw the rope around John’s neck and John’s face looking at me. I screamed and ran …
Two Views of San DiegoI used to consider San Diego roads relatively sane, compared to L.A. Now the freeway is full of lunatics. Everyone’s trying to go faster than the next guy. People used to …
Shoot If You Must This Old Grey Head The complainer expects to be in agreement: he is certain that there is some chicanery afoot if his innate common sense clashes with some idea he encounters: …
Shoot If You Must This Old Grey Head The complainer expects to be in agreement: he is certain that there is some chicanery afoot if his innate common sense clashes with some idea he encounters: …
Duncan Shepherd was the Reader's sole movie critic for nearly 40 years. When he came to the Reader, Shepherd was a graduate student and teaching assistant in the Visual Arts department of UCSD, under critic …
1973 San Diego guide to San Diego guidebooks What Neil Morgan never told you. 1973 San Diego guide to the San Diego Reader Who are these people? 1973 San Diego guide to cheesecake Supermarket, specialty …
It had to end sometime. Now’s as bad a time as any. After thirty-eight years of them — commencing with a typo-marred encomium on Hickey and Boggs dated November 2, 1972 — this is to …
Granted, Clint Eastwood in his senior years has demonstrated a remarkable readiness to broaden his boundaries as a director. A quick check of his filmography will show that as long ago as his middle-aged Breezy, …
Trepidation is not the ideal frame of mind in which to approach a film, even around Halloween. But after I Stand Alone and Irreversible, the French enfant terrible Gaspar Noé merits nothing less and nothing …
Sort of a Sorry, Wrong Number for the cellphone age, Buried is a gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness …
Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet, will be revealed in The Social Network. That’s not to say you will understand it. Structured as an …
Ben Affleck’s second directed film, The Town, is a moderately diverting, mildly despicable game of cops-and-robbers that counts, in its play for the spectator’s sympathies, on the moral depravity of the public at large, a …
For your Mafia fix, you can safely go to The Sicilian Girl, a fictionalized factual story from the fatherland, focussed on (at the start) the ten-year-old daughter of a soon murdered mob boss, slowly simmering …
Top of the heap this week, The Tillman Story rehashes the shameful facts of how Pat Tillman, Jr., the Arizona Cardinal who set aside a professional football career to enlist in the Army post-9/11, had …
They don’t call them the dog days for nothing. Blockbusters are all behind us. Here’s what’s before us. The Switch. Thin-ice romantic comedy tolerable only insofar as you can tolerate the greased wheels of contrivance …
One of the promises of the independent cinema, seldom fulfilled, is that it take up the jobs abdicated by today’s Hollywood. The job taken up in Cairo Time is, no condescension intended, that of the …
Todd Solondz has described his Life during Wartime as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness. This is helpful inasmuch as it has been a dozen years since the quasi-predecessor, and although I think of that one as …
Lowering the temperature on the Cold War, below freezing, Salt exposes a subterranean population of Russian “sleeper” agents with far more nefarious designs than those of the eleven happy capitalists rounded up recently (and for …
Acclamations of genius plus megamillions at the box-office equal a license for self-indulgence. Case at hand: critical favorite Christopher Nolan plus popular favorite The Dark Knight equal Inception. To all those responsible, filmmaker and favorers …
Pardon my priorities. Now that Alain Resnais has been addressed in timely fashion, I am able to double-back and attend to a matter of greater public concern. Tens if not dozens of readers will have …
The first if not the most remarkable thing about Wild Grass is the simple fact that it will open locally, at the Ken on Friday. The last Alain Resnais film to do so, also at …
Latest outflow from the sluggish mainstream and the rushing tributaries: Winter’s Bone. Debra Granik’s top-prize recipient at this year’s Sundance festival, a poky, low-key, somewhat parsimonious rural thriller with a simple set-up: if absent Dad, …
Pixar’s Toy Story 3, or if it makes any difference Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3, adds little but minutes to the previous sequel, and for a computer-animated children’s film it adds quite a lot of …
Faced with The A-Team and The Karate Kid, or going back to pick up the slighted Get Him to the Greek and Marmaduke, I did what any free-willed film fan would do: went to the …
In my years at this post, there have been no fewer than three re-releases of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (A measure, some might suggest, of a too long length of time.) The latest one, at the …
Summer got started without me. Let’s see what I’ve missed. Iron Man 2, to take the first thing first, serves a sequel’s purpose; it gives the sheep somewhere to go and get clipped. No one …
Back when Kathryn Bigelow was having, or about to have, her historic victory as Best Director on Oscar night, we were hearing some dire statistics about the percentage of female directors in the grand total. …
Had I consented to watch my DVD screener of The Square, there would have been more than a couple of days left in its solo week at the Ken Cinema before I could say that …
The Academy Award for foreign film is historically a hard one to handicap. That’s because the voters in that category must meet the requirement of actually seeing the nominees, all five of them, in effect …
We seem to have entered a brief period of frenzy between the pre-Oscar stasis and the slow summer pace of one blockbuster per week. I’m keeping up as best I can. Kick-Ass. Alias Smart-Ass, a …
Something to live for (now that March Madness has passed): the new Alain Resnais film, Wild Grass, new as of the Cannes film festival last May, has popped up on the Landmark schedule for the …
Just to keep pace with the fast-breaking developments, a quick timeout from basketball: Chloe. A renaming and reworking by Atom Egoyan of the French film Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Despite the pedigree (Egoyan, if you …
In between films at the San Diego Latino Film Festival, I can spare but passing glances at the world outside. And with the NCAA basketball tournament added this Thursday to the ongoing festival, we can’t …
Well, you wouldn’t expect Tim Burton to do a remake of Pollyanna, would you? Or Little Women or Anne of Green Gables or anything that might push back against the enveloping voguish “darkness,” anything that …
In contention for the foreign-film Oscar, in contention to be exact for two more days after its debut on Friday at the Landmark Hillcrest, A Prophet is a sort of Prisoner’s Progress, a brutal and …
Major filmmakers, minor films: Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer respectively. “Disturbing” would be one word for the Scorsese, maybe the best word. Leonardo DiCaprio, the director’s torchbearer now in four …
Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia …
It seems impossible to speak of Mel Gibson’s “comeback” in Edge of Darkness without speaking of what it is he is coming back from. But speaking strictly, the aftermath of his arrest for drunk driving …
Revivals aside, we are lucky to get one black-and-white film a year. So we must count ourselves lucky, already in January, to get Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a common choice in cultural hubs as …
First let me confess. I do not know what I’m talking about. Anything naive, ill-informed, mistaken in what follows will be admitted freely without need of threat or torture. I am confident I speak for …
Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart is pretty much the whole show. His Bad Blake, given name to be held back for the gravestone, is an over-the-hill and down-on-his-luck C&W singer still living the life of …
One thing seems clear. The surprise announcement in June of the expansion of the Oscars’ Best Picture category to ten nominees, a virtual Ten Best list exclusive of foreign films (not just second-class citizens but …
The last of the last. A Single Man. The Christmas movie for holiday depressives (who after all deserve one, too), an adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel detailing the planned last day of a homosexual …
The reviewer of Avatar seems honor-bound to declare which Avatar he is reviewing. Me? 2-D, no. 3-D, yes. IMAX, no. I’m in no position to gauge the differences. Viewers who opt for 2-D, and for …
Here they come, “for your consideration,” clear through Christmas, elbowing each other to the finish line. So consider in haste. Invictus takes its title from the Henley poem of the same name: “my unconquerable soul... …
On the Thanksgiving menu: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which I was horrified to see is the verbatim title on screen and not just promotional overkill, would qualify as the year’s worst …
Through Independence Day and Godzilla, pre-9/11, and The Day after Tomorrow post-9/11, transplanted German filmmaker Roland Emmerich has inched closer to the edge of the abyss for a view of the apocalypse. In 2012, which …
Beg pardon, but it has taken me a week to untie my tongue on the subject of Antichrist, which closes out its seven days at the Ken on Thursday. A piece of art-house schlock from …