Austin’s Powers

“10 People will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch.” So proclaims the poster for The Condemned, a movie executive-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon and starring self-professed “whup-ass machine” “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and oft-suspended former soccer star Vinnie Jones. So can someone explain where…

Women of Iraq

The purpose of 9 Parts of Desire is to get us thinking about Iraqis not in sectarian or sociological terms but as individuals. Thinking about them this way, coming face to face with the fucked-up lives of civilians caught between the most astonishing military machine ever created and an evil…

Stop at X

Six years ago, during her short but influential tenure at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, then-curator Samantha Salzinger initiated a juried biennial for the center’s museum space. It was one of her many innovations, and it was just what was needed at an institution that sometimes seemed on…

Artbeat

Kimonos are too lovely to be trusted; surely, they have something up their long, silky sleeves. “The Secret Life of Japanese Textiles” brings their mysteries out into the open, unveiling not only these traditional vestments commonly associated with Japanese culture but also their lesser-known counterparts. For instance, the Ni Kumi…

Five Wonders of the World

Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc collection, finding among such holy-shit discoveries a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites dining…

This Is Madness

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive

Platform: PSP

Price: $29.99

ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)

Score: 4 (out of 10)

Our top DVD picks for the week of April 24:

Al Franken: God Spoke (Docurama) Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line) Columbo: Mystery Murder Collection 1989 (Universal) Déjà Vu (Buena Vista) The Documentaries of Louis Malle (Criterion) The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Flipper: Season One (MGM) .45 (Velocity) Ironside: Season 1 (Shout! Factory) Jean Renoir:…

A Little Bit Dead

As one of the elder statesmen of the local gothic/industrial community, Doug MacDuff has seen his fair share of weekly parties come and go. The 33-year veteran DJ, better known as Godfather (“because I don’t know anyone who’s been doing this longer than me,” he says), has been filling dance…

Palm Beach, Off the Map

Since the Palm Beach International Film Festival went competitive in 2003, it’s slathered love on a pretty diverse array of films. The award for Best Feature has gone to flicks as quirky as Neo-Ned, a love story about a neo-Nazi and a black chick utterly convinced she’s the reincarnation of…

Full Nelson

This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer this time is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of…

Rachel Stein, Showgirl

Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who has watched her family massacred…

Artbeat

Kimonos are too lovely to be trusted; surely, they have something up their long, silky sleeves. “The Secret Life of Japanese Textiles” brings their mysteries out into the open, unveiling not only these traditional vestments commonly associated with Japanese culture but also their lesser-known counterparts. For instance, the Ni Kumi…

Cleaning House

Michael Feingold is a wonderful, witty, and cantankerous coot, and his work makes me think and smile in equal measure. He is one of the theater critics at our flagship paper, the Village Voice, so I say this both out of genuine admiration and a certain, panicky sense of self-preservation…

Released on DVD this Week

Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever — not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in…

Hot Mama

Publisher: Majesco

Platform: Wii

Price: $49.99

ESRB Rating: E (for Everyone)

Score: 7 (out of 10)

Our top DVD picks for the week of April 17:

Brute Force: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Cutie Honey: The Movie (Bandai) Double Happiness (Image) Forgiving Dr. Mengele (First Run) Freedom Writers (Paramount) George Lopez: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Warner Bros.) Happy Days: The Second Season (Paramount) The History Boys (Fox) The Image (Warner Bros.) La Haine: The Criterion…

Peeping Bomb

Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film clearly is based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…

Little Box, Big Screen

Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake — the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…

Cactus in Winter

Listen: You really, really need to go see Animals & Plants at Mad Cat Theatre. I’m not kidding. Go. When you do, here’s what will happen: You will enter the theater by walking across the stage itself, and you will be struck by the dirty aesthetic purity of the thing…

From Paris With Heat

Art or softcore porn? That might well have been the question weighing on the minds of a few people poking their heads into Saba Gallery on Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard one recent afternoon. The potential gallerygoers were mostly older, and, while a couple of the men seemed intrigued, the…

Artbeat

“You come for the exhibit and you get a whole city,” museum educator Brandy Brownlee told me enthusiastically on a guided tour of “The Good News Gospel Exhibit” at Spady Cultural Heritage Museum. The first floor, formerly the dining room and living room of the home of community leader and…

Olympian Gold

The residents of Mount Olympus haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Kratos moved in. Not only is the new god of war a grumpy, self-professed god-hater, he got the throne by killing Ares, something that naturally makes the other gods a little . . . jumpy. It’s not long…