Break it down to the Beastie Boys' smart-ass advocacy of the everydude, or their ability to agilely swing with hip-hop's developments and evolve with their more adventurous listeners, but Adam Yauch (MCA), Mike Diamond (Mike D), and Adam Horovitz (Adrock) have always maintained a special "relationship" with their fans. Their new concert film, Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!, a listener-producer "collabo," as Yauch puts it, explodes that bond. Read more »

The best films resensitize you, making acts as simple as walking down the street or even breathing seem new. Such is the case with Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven, an audacious collection of slow, circular pans and long tracking shots that travel ever deeper into the mysterious relationship between a chauffeur named Marcos (Marcos Hern?

SATIRE Outfitted with a name that sounds shiny and desirable, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is in the business of eating shit with a smile, then pretending that aforementioned shit is, in fact, a brand! new! renewable! energy source! Such jaw-dropping insincerity is a must when you've got his job: chief national public-relations shill for the tobacco industry. There's no putting a good face on the promotion and sales of "cancer sticks" anymore, is there? Read more »

In the not-so-Wild West, where assistant directors on Segways roam, washed-up matinee idol Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) gallops right off the set of his latest picture, appropriately dubbed Phantom of the West. Where Howard's headed at the start of Don't Come Knocking

Given that the phrase another Vietnam (with or without fucking in the middle) probably passes through lips somewhere every .0000398 seconds at present, it might be a good moment to ponder differences between war-themed movies from the 1960s and today.

Admittedly, the Vietnam War had been going on for a while by the time significant mainstream movieland responses emerged. Among them were John Wayne's notorious The Green Berets, the morally ambiguous Patton, and myriad antiwar diatribes, of which Catch-22, MASH, Little Big Man, Joe, and Soldier Blue were just the tip

Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things is the preposterous story, once widely imagined to be true, of the childhood of Jeremiah "JT" LeRoy, as he bounces between the custody of his foster parents, his prostitute mother, and his sadistic, fundamentalist grandparents. Read more »

'Neo-Benshi Night: Move Over, Big Screen'

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For proof – as if any is needed – that television is overwhelmingly a right-wing medium, one need only contemplate the manner in which DNA evidence is cited in the glut of true crime shows that crowd A&E, CourtTV, and other networks. Almost without fail, DNA is shown being used to convict the guilty. It is presented as proof that the legal system – with scientific help – is just and right. Read more »

Perhaps the best book written about a wrongly convicted man is Jack Olsen's Last Man Standing, a chronicle of the 27 years Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt spent caged in a California prison thanks to crooked FBI agents and Los Angeles cops. The narrative starts with Pratt's childhood in Louisiana, tracks his involvement in the Black Panther party and the decades he spent dwelling in the American gulag, and concludes with his triumphant release from prison thanks to the tireless lawyering of Stuart Hanlon and the late Johnnie Cochran. Read more »

Most teen starlets are probably satisfied to look their hottest on press junkets and don the cutest duds they can find at Fred Segal. But at 15, Q'Orianka Kilcher isn't your average Teen Vogue pinup. Perhaps it's indicative of the added expectations – and attendant ambitions – that come with playing Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's The New World, but Kilcher seemed to be firing on all cylinders, in terms of accomplishments, when she showed up at San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton in gorgeous multiskinned boots and a covetable leather jacket, both of which she made herself. Read more »