I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept.. then there's Clive Owen, rising above it all. Aloof yet watchful, the actor cultivates an inner stillness that is perfect for faintly ironic brooders. He neither distances himself from this risible material nor pulls out the stops and opens himself to ridicule. His King Arthur tells us little about Arthur, but much about protecting one's flank. The mark of a box-office king?

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.

If I had to catalog all the moronic plot turns in The Day After Tomorrow, we'd be here until the next ice age. It's just so very bad. You can have a pretty good time snickering at it-unless, like me, you think there's something to this global warming thing, and you shudder at the irony of a movie meant to warn people about a dangerous environmental trend that completely discredits it. Is it possible that the film is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as anti-environmentalists always claim they are?