Arts Review
Obituary
Les Paul: A legacy of ground-breaking musical invention
By Tony Cornwell, August 19, 2009
As well as being a beautiful player who never sacrificed musical ideas for flashy displays of technique, Les Paul was responsible for key advances in musical recording techniques.
“The Balibo deaths represented part of the broader tragedy that befell East Timor”
Director Robert Connolly speaks with WSWS
By Richard Phillips, August 17, 2009
Robert Connolly discusses Balibo, his latest feature about the military execution of five television reporters in East Timor in 1975.
Balibo: A war crime exposed
By Richard Phillips, August 17, 2009
Balibo tells how five young reporters working for Australian television were murdered in East Timor by the Indonesian military in the lead-up to the invasion of the tiny country in 1975.
Funny People: Requiem for a paperweight
By Tom Horton, August 14, 2009
Funny People, producer-director Judd Apatow’s bid for recognition as a serious filmmaker, serves instead as the first major theatrical failure since his string of hits began in 2004.
Germany: Berlin cinema shows films commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall
By Bernd Reinhardt, August 11, 2009
On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, a cinema in the German capital showed a retrospective of films dealing with the event.
The Hurt Locker: Part of a deplorable trend
By Joanne Laurier, August 10, 2009
The new film directed by Kathryn Bigelow focuses on an Army bomb deactivation—or Explosive Ordnance Disposal—squad, during its last 38 days of deployment in Iraq in 2004.
A Thousand Splendid Suns: The plight of Afghan women only partially depicted
By Harvey Thompson, August 8, 2009
Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, like his first, The Kite Runner, is set against the background of Afghanistan’s recent history.
Gurrumul: an evocative and unique musical contribution
By Tony Cornwell, August 7, 2009
The most remarkable feature of Gurrumul, the recent first album by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, is this blind Australian indigenous singer’s extraordinary voice.
Writer Budd Schulberg, unrepentant informer, dead at 95
By David Walsh, August 7, 2009
Schulberg was a member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s and subsequently “named names” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in May 1951. To the end of his life he de...
500 Days of Summer: The eternally sunlit paradise that is Los Angeles
By Jordan Mattos, August 3, 2009
A graphic designer with dreams of becoming an architect falls head over heels for an elusive lady, and the film goes back and forth in time, highlighting the 500 days of their courtship, with equal do...
Is Chéri genuinely ‘subversive’?
By Joanne Laurier, August 1, 2009
In Stephen Frears’ new movie, Chéri, based on a novel by Colette, a voiceover asserts that in Paris, during the Belle Époque (the 1870s to World War I), successful courtesans were the most powerfu...
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration: Also not very compelling
By David Walsh, July 29, 2009
In Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, Simon is a high school student in Toronto, whose teacher, for reasons of her own, encourages him to pose as the son of a would-be terrorist.
