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By Allen Gardner

Prometheus (20th Century Fox) Ridley Scott’s quasi-prequel to his 1979 classic “Alien” has an intergalactic exploratory team (Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba) arriving on a uncharted planet, where they discover what appears to be a dormant alien spacecraft and what might be the first discovery of intelligent life outside of Earth. Of course, everything goes straight to hell before you can scream “Don’t touch that egg!” Sumptuous visuals and strong performances from the cast (not to mention a nearly-perfect first half) can’t compensate for gaping plot and logic holes that nearly sink the proceedings in the film’s protracted second half. It feels as though some very crucial footage wound up on the cutting room floor. Perhaps, as with “Alien” and “Aliens” we’ll see a “Director’s Cut” of “Prometheus” arriving on DVD within the next year. In the meantime,...

"Twenty years ago," blogs the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones today, "I spent an afternoon shuffling around Rocks In Your Head, a record store that once did business on Prince Street. (It closed in 2006.) My friend Jim worked the counter, and we were listening to a new album, over and over: Nirvana's Nevermind. At some point, Vernon Reid — the guitar player and founder of Living Colour — came in. He listened to four songs, nodded approvingly, and approached the counter. 'Metallica plus R.E.M. That's really smart.' He bought a copy and left."

Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills, who formally announced the amicable dissolution of R.E.M. yesterday, will surely be hoping their band will be remembered as more than half the formula for another band ten years their junior (and, for what it's worth, I personally believe they will be), but if this anecdote is the first...

Sometimes it takes a little serendipity for a rock documentary to become something special. While the filmmakers behind classics such as Don’t Look Back, Woodstock, and Gimme Shelter deserve credit for choosing their subjects wisely, they couldn’t have predicted their excellent timing. The same can be said of Dave Markey’s 1991: The Year That Punk Broke, an occasionally amateurish, frequently riveting film about Sonic Youth’s tour of European rock festivals in August 1991. As the band’s Thurston Moore admits during a panel discussion included in the extras for the film’s new DVD edition, 1991 ...

The fabled rock documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke documented New York music pioneers Sonic Youth’s famous European tour featuring Nirvana has the opening act. The film also featured the likes of Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland, Gumball, The Ramones, Mark Arm, Dan Peters and Matt Lukin of Mudhoney, Courtney Love of Hole, and Joe Cole, who was murdered in a robbery three months after the tour ended… thus the film is dedicated to him. David Markey the director describes his film as “a home movie on acid, but for fans of Sonic Youth, it’s a must see and a thoroughly entertaining nostalgia trip.

Two decades since it’s release and now the film will finally make its way to DVD and is slated for a fall release. Why did it take so long? I can only guess it had something to do with obtaining the rights to...

If you were a teenager in the early '90s making your way through the punk and indie music of the decade, there was a good chance you had a copy of "1991: The Year Punk Broke" on your shelf. Directed by Dave Markey, the project was simply a documentary of Sonic Youth's European tour but the whole film gained a lot more attention when a little band from Seattle called Nirvana, who were opening for the elder statesmen, blew up huge. Instead, the film became a document of the burgeoning grunge scene and a behind-the-scenes look at Sonic Youth, Nirvana,…...

Last year, we reported that Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore was planning to launch Ecstatic Peace Library, a publishing company to keep him busy between running his record label of the same name and, you know, fronting Sonic Youth. Ecstatic Peace Library came into the world in early January and already it’s loosed page-turners from Kim Gordon, Moore himself, James Hamilton, director Dave Markey, poet Charles Plymell, and, coming soon, Yoko Ono....