“Iron Man” is a great movie for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the action sequences and pyrotechnic displays. Ultimately, though, the themes go deeper than this, and the informed viewer can sense their complexity beneath the surface of the film. Behind the character story of a young Playboy taking [...]

Alex in Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” is a movie on the edge of experimental, just narrative enough to be engaging, but artistic enough that it might make you scratch your head a bit. As with Gus Van Sant’s other movies, like “Elefant,” it’s about tortured youth and disillusionment. [...]

I love movies that inspire a positive reception, and then a backlash, and then an anti-backlash. That’s the sign of a film that’s getting under our cultural skins, and the big winner in that regard, neatly wrapping up 2007, was “Juno,” a smart little film that positions itself somewhere between the emotional uncertainty of [...]

Depp and Carter in “Sweeney Todd” This season’s non-standard holiday masterpiece was definitely “Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” a fascinating piece of cinema directed by Tim Burton, who inherited the story from playwright Stephen Sondheim. It’s certainly a hit among critics, whose reviews, collected on RottenTomatoes.com, are an impressive 86% positive. This [...]

Ian Curtis isn’t happy in Corbijn’s “Control.” I’ve seen two biopics in the last two months, and you may not have heard of either of them. The first was “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and the second was “Control,” Anton Corbijn’s biopic about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. [...]

John Guyton, main character “The Nightly News” has been getting a lot of press, apparently, and for good reason. Jonathan Hickman’s graphic novel, which I finished over the last couple days, is a bold experiment in both style and content. Its storyline is designed, as much as illustrated, relying on entangled compositions, simple color [...]

William Gibson’s new novel, released Aug. 7 Of all the authors to forecast trends in tech culture, I think William Gibson has proven one of the more interesting. He released a new book recently, entitled “Spook Country,” and from my early foray into its pages, I can already see that it’s iconic Gibsonesque writing wrapped [...]

“3:10 to Yuma” hit theaters last weekend, a full-frontal assault of gritty old Western bravado. I vastly enjoyed it, because I?m a big fan of atmospherics and muscular cinematography, and this film offered plenty of both. It was two hours of intensity, a drawn-out display of excessive masculinity, and it does justice to [...]

In a glorious explosion of media cross-pollination, Dark Horse Comics has partnered with MySpace to bring an online series of comics to social network pedestrians. I found it in an ad on MySpace?s front page, and I?m shocked I hadn?t heard of it before then. After all, it was announced more than a month [...]

On Monday, The New York Times reported that John Ashbery, an 80-year old poet, is slated to become mtvU?s poet laureate. Ashbery is a freeform postmodern writer who?s received a number of awards, and mtvU is Music Television?s college network. Once again, we see the arts and the mass media (”commercial” and “entertainment” [...]