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Patching together portraits of his beloved Portland streets, bits of Shakespeare’s Henry IV via Welles’ tumultuous Chimes at Midnight, and vignettes of a narcoleptic vagabond hustler whose motherless anxieties send him travelling through time and space in shimmeringly nostalgic deep sleep, Gus Van Sant‘s My Own Private Idaho is a wildly original amalgam of cultural references and personal investments that transcend a mere tip of the hat. Riding high in the wake of Drugstore Cowboy‘s Hollywood success, Van Sant convinced River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, two rising Tinseltown heart-throbs, to take a serious risk, committing themselves, against the loudly voiced opinions of their agents, to a pair of overtly homosexual roles in a film that opens with an off-screen blowjob. After River was awarded the prizes for Best Actor from the Venice International Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards and the National Society of Film Critics Awards...

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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I’ve spent many a night in my room, curtains closed, door shut, with only the light from my laptop’s screen acting as a potential beacon for the desperate moths outside, trying to smash my window with their bodyweight. I’ll be lying over the covers of the bed, nodding my head to the music pouring out of my laptop, typing away at this very keyboard, typing, typing, typing. Before, on these many nights, you’d have found me nodding my head along to a band called Despised Icon; the band were – and maybe still are – a favourite of mine; I’d often listen to them and similar bands after reviewing a band for other sites/publications that I wasn’t too fond of. You know, listen to something you like and are familiar with and you instantly feel as if a weight...

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Lamb Of God is one of the most respected, influential and successful bands in modern metal. They’ve built up a following over the course of their career due to their abrasive, uncompromising yet technical sound and their renowned live shows which have become revered and admired both because of the band’s ability to create a great atmosphere and also because they (arguably) sound even better live than on studio recordings. Their gigs are also some of the most hectic and in-your-face you’ll go to – I should know as I lost both my trainers in the pit in one of their London headlining gigs and had to endure the rest of their set with people parading over my feet. But it was worth it. Even though I’d been a Lamb Of God fan for years, that was my first time seeing them live...

Both new Danish political drama Borgen and Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady show us there is still no clear map for women in politics

For anyone wanting to see a woman politician operating at the top of her game, the new Danish drama Borgen offered a brilliant, if fictional, example on Saturday night. The first episode showed Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the Moderate party leader, in the last three days of an election race, emerging as the model of a modern political player, both morally and tactically. She is a woman willing to change course if necessary, but unwilling to compromise or double-cross. Would she support damaging information being leaked about a rival? "How dirty do you think I am?" she asks her spin doctor: "I'd never forgive myself if I came to power in that way." "In that case, I doubt you ever will," he remarks, but her ascent continues.

This article was originally published in November 2010. We dusted it off in time for The Thing prequel's release. "Why don't we just wait here for a little while. See what happens..." With those haunting final words spoken by R.J. MacReady, accompanied by the ominous, pulsing score of Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter's 1982 creature feature, The Thing , ended on an ambiguous note, leaving the door wide open for a sequel. A dismal performance at the box office killed any chances of that, however. The Thing would live on as a once critically-panned remake to a film which has been hailed for its FX achievements (by Rob Bottin), moreover, it was a film later analyzed and accepted as not just a masterful re-telling of John Campbell's "Who Goes There?"...

This article was originally published in November 2010. We dusted it off in time for The Thing prequel's release. "Why don't we just wait here for a little while. See what happens..." With those haunting final words spoken by R.J. MacReady, accompanied by the ominous, pulsing score of Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter's 1982 creature feature, The Thing , ended on an ambiguous note, leaving the door wide open for a sequel. A dismal performance at the box office killed any chances of that, however. The Thing would live on as a once critically-panned remake to a film which has been hailed for its FX achievements (by Rob Bottin), moreover, it was a film later analyzed and accepted as not just a masterful re-telling of John Campbell's "Who Goes There?"...

Since April somehow got away from us without a cover hotties post for that month–I blame Game of Thrones, which significantly increased my work load And distracted me from looking at any other part of Sff fandom–the usual formatted version of this column will return for May. But April was just too good a month for dudes for me to not make some mention of them, so I’m foregoing Damon’s input on the ladies and just sharing the eye candy my fellow ladies might enjoy. Did I miss your pick? Feel free to point it out in the comments!

So here they are, the cover dudes from April that would make me take a second look on the street.

For me there is no clear winner, so consider my top three interchangeable based on mood and lighting. Up first is smoldering on the cover of Douglas...

When John Carpenter set out to make 1982's "The Thing," working from a script by Bill Lancaster, what made it exciting was the way he went back to the John Campbell short story that inspired the '50s film and created something very, very different.  I have trouble even calling his movie a remake, because it doesn't bear much resemblance at all to the Christian Nyby film "The Thing From Another World," no matter how much it served as a precursor. I mention this to try to set some context for the news that Matt Reeves, director of "Cloverfield" and "Let Me...

Versatile founder member of Fretwork, the group that gave English music for viols an international appeal

Richard Campbell, who has died unexpectedly aged 55, was a multifaceted musician best known as a founder member of the viol consort Fretwork. From their London debut in 1986, they shook the dust off the English consort repertoire and gave it international appeal as concert music.

Richard played the treble viol, and later the tenor, in the group, which quickly established a global reputation for fastidiously crafted interpretations of consort music from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods through to Henry Purcell, combined with a creative drive to commission new works that exploited the ensemble's exotic sound-palette.

He featured in 31 recorded albums, on Virgin Classics and Harmonia Mundi, as well as on film soundtracks including Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) – Richard's constant companions – and The Da Vinci Code (2006). The group won two major recording prizes: a French grand prix...

"War, war, war. Stand up ... and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you." —SMS message sent in Jos, Nigeria, during Jan. 2010 riots that left 326 dead.

Optimistically called “Nigeria's tourist haven” in publicity materials, the Nigerian Plateau state straddles the fault line between the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. It's divided between 40-odd ethnic groups who've feuded for the past decade. Riots have regularly broken out over access to government, desertification, and economic dominance. Hundreds have died. And often, as was the case in deadly 2008 and 2010 riots, SMS text messages helped make it all possible.

While mobile tech has empowered a lot of social innovation in Africa, ideas for squelching SMS-fueled riots are slow-coming. Meanwhile, the simplest form of mobile communication is igniting flare-ups in some of the continent's most combustible conflicts. In early September,...

See 6 new clips from Sony Pictures Classics' documentary "Inside Job" which is narrated by Matt Damon and includes William Ackman, managing partner, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, Daniel Alpert, founding managing director of Westwood Capital, Jonathan Alpert, licensed psychotherapist, John Campbell, department chair of Harvard University's Department of Economics among others. From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes "Inside Job," the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs...

"Inside Job" is currently at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Check out pics from the documentary narrated by Matt Damon which Sony Pictures has distribution rights to. The Charles Ferguson-helmed film includes William Ackman, managing partner, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, Daniel Alpert, founding managing director of Westwood Capital, Jonathan Alpert, licensed psychotherapist and John Campbell, department chair of Harvard University's Department of Economics among others. Academy Award® nominated filmmaker Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), directs the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, "Inside Job"...

Breck Eisner's The Crazies is coming out tomorrow, which is a remake of a horror film so little seen that most people don't even realize it's a remake (for the record, it's a remake of a George Romero 1973 film). It's one of about 100 horror movie remakes that have come out in the last century (most of those in the last decade or so). But hell if any of them are any damn good -- it's so bad, in fact, that my list of the top five horror movie remakes jumps the shark right after number four.

But why? Why hasn't a studio been able to make very many decent horror movie remakes? It's a fairly easy explanation, really. Horror films are low-risk investments, if they're produced correctly . Most horror films will manage to eke out in the range of $30 to $60 million at the box office, but there's a ceiling,...

When the trailer for a low budget film called After Last Season debuted on websites last March many people assumed it was a prank. More specifically, rumors started doing the Internet rounds that the trailer was the work of director Spike Jonze and was part of a viral marketing campaign for his forthcoming adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, which opens Oct. 16.

Jonze certainly enjoys a good joke. The filmmaker co-produced and appeared in both Jackass movies and once picked up an MTV Award in the guise of a fictional choreographer named “Richard Koufey.” And the trailer does look like some kind of gag. The footage features a star-free cast flatly reciting dull, disconnected dialogue in spartanly-decorated rooms. One part of the trailer consists of a man announcing down the phone, “They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.” The footage also boasts some extremely basic...

Variety confirms B-d's report that commercials director Matthijs Van Heijningen has been hired by Universal to helm a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing . The story is set at the icy Norwegian camp where the shape-shifting "thing" from another world is discovered, revived and set loose on the men. These are, of course, the events that went down before Carpenter's '82 take on John Campbell Jr's. "Who Goes There?" Battlestar Galactica 's Ron Moore is still on board to script. He was attached some time ago. Strike Entertainment's Eric Newman and Marc Abraham are producing with David Foster wearing an executive producer's cap.