Ken Burns

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Review: Gingko Blue

Getting the tone of a cocktail bar just right
As the recent Ken Burns documentary Prohibition revealed, the woman-led movement to eliminate alcoholic drinks was fueled by a desire to eliminate a certain kind of masculine behavior — loud, abusive, irresponsible loutishness.
By BRIAN DUFF | October 26, 2011

Paging Chicken Little

City motivated to panic; Making things better; close encounter of the weird kind
Behaving with all the coolheaded aplomb of Prissy — the young maid in Gone With the Wind — Providence school honchos and the city's emergency management agency managed to make a king-size balls-up of the arrival of the "Get Motivated" speakers seminar at the Dunkin' Donuts Center.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | October 05, 2011

Prohibition drinking game!

Play along with the upcoming Ken Burns documentary
Leave it to Ken Burns and PBS to crash our romantic Boardwalk Empire fantasies with a scholarly five-and-a-half-hour, sepia-tinted tome about the rip-roaring Twenties.
By CHRIS FARAONE | September 28, 2011

Review: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Joseph Dorman's portrait of Aleichem
Not many these days are familiar with Aleichem's own story, or his other work, or his impact on Jewish culture and literature in general.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 31, 2011

Errol Morris's magnificent obsessions

Mr. Natural
The tops of the side tables in Errol Morris's office are entirely obscured by books, among them Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory ; The Education of T.C. Mits: What Modern Mathematics Means to You ; French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's Écrits , and an anthology of Weekly World News stories.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | July 13, 2011

Review: Pontine explores Hawthorne's ancestral thriller

Spirit world
Perhaps nowhere in America is the past as tangible a presence as it is in New England.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 04, 2011

Getting the story

Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux sing jazz's many strains
Full-length written histories of jazz can be a slog. Especially since "the story of jazz" (as critic Marshall Stearns titled his 1956 tome) only gets longer and more complicated. Personally, on these prose-narrative trips along the New Orleans–New York axis of musical development, I usually bog down somewhere outside Chicago.
By JON GARELICK | December 01, 2009

By | January 01, 0001

Interview: Ken Burns

On his latest PBS documentary, The National Parks
After watching The National Parks: America's Best Idea , it would be easy to conclude that it all could have been said a lot faster. Ken Burns disagrees — but he's not just being defensive.
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 25, 2009

Holy landscape!

Ken Burns worships America's spiritual resource
At its core, Ken Burns's PBS 12-hour epic The National Parks: America's Best Idea (nightly on WGBH Channel 2 at 8 pm, from September 27 through October 2) is a selective, initiative by initiative, advocate by advocate, chronicle of the evolution of the National Parks system and the changing roles protected lands have played in American culture since Congress validated Yosemite in 1864.
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 24, 2009

Photos: The National Parks: America's Best Idea

Images from Ken Burns's latest documentary
Scenes from The National Parks: America's Best Idea , a six-part, 12-hour film by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, George Masa.
By PHOENIX STAFF | September 24, 2009

By | January 01, 0001

Tours of duty

John Clifford and Billy Bang's Vietnam; plus Icons Among Us and bye-bye Jazz Brunch
Clifford and Bang will celebrate Memorial Day weekend together at Highland Kitchen in Somerville this Sunday in a program called "Basic Training: An Evening of Art, Music, and Poetry."
By JON GARELICK | May 18, 2009

Review: Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

Legacy Edition
Early rocker turned country icon Cash hit California's Folsom like a lightning bolt on January 13, 1968, delivering two raw shows to a captive audience.
By TED DROZDOWSKI | December 09, 2008

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

A darker-than-usual take on the author
As always with Porter, you can expect intelligence in the writing and insights into the bio subject.
By GERALD PEARY | September 09, 2008

The long view

Bob Blumenthal’s history of jazz
Bob Blumenthal’s first book is out, and the wonder is that we didn’t get it sooner.
By JON GARELICK | January 29, 2008

The Cool School

An uncool conventional film
It’s interested in the scene — and as scene movies go, it’s a clunker.
By RICHARD BECK | October 31, 2007

Free speech!

Obama heads in the right direction with his latest strategic maneuvers, but still lacks a killer stump address
Finally, Barack Obama has begun drawing contrasts between himself and Hillary Clinton.
By STEVEN STARK | October 24, 2007

Sexual Halen

The little Dutch boys who could
Good news from the literary delivery room: the ignoble genre of rock biography has just given birth to its first genuine comedy.
By JAMES PARKER | October 23, 2007

Dynasty

Small troupes take on The Kentucky Cycle
What would induce a tiny fringe contingent to take on the six hours of Robert Schenkkan’s 1992 Pulitzer-winning spectacle, The Kentucky Cycle ?
By IRIS FANGER | September 26, 2007

The War is swell

Ken Burns captures reflections in ‘Hell’s own cesspool’
Sometime in the late ’80s, I was sharing some Iron City with my father at the bar of a Pittsburgh American Legion post.
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 18, 2007

In praise of four-letter words

Or why the FCC should go fuck itself
The perversity of today’s FCC is that by being vague it can be more effectively chilling, censorious, and repressive.
By EDITORIAL | August 29, 2007

Right turns

Truth and reconciliation at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Maybe things are getting better.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 10, 2007

Film noir or red meat?

And Ric Burns’s Warhol documentary
On this, all agree: nobody in 1940s Hollywood consciously made “film noirs,” though that’s what we now call The Maltese Falcon , Double Indemnity , The Big Sleep , and other dark, cynical, crime melodramas.
By GERALD PEARY | September 12, 2006

Monkey see, monkey do

Into the cute at the DeCordova
So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. Slideshow: Going Ape: Confronting Animals In Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
By CHRISTOPHER MILLIS | September 12, 2006

Sketchy

Artists’ notebooks at the Fogg, issues of extinction at the Gardner, and ‘Photographing Great Horses’ at the Fitchburg
Art — like music, physics, literature, dance, and other creative pursuits — rarely springs forth from the imagination in its final form.
By RANDI HOPKINS | July 19, 2006

CSA: The Confederate States of America

Mockumentary recasts results of "The War of Northern Aggression."
Those who found Spike Lee’s Bamboozled too subtle won’t have that problem with Kevin Willmott’s satire.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 23, 2006

New to DVD for the week of January 13, 2006

Capsule Reviews of The Constant Gardener, Red Eye, Saraband , and Transporter 2
The Constant Gardener, Red Eye, Saraband , and Transporter 2
By | January 18, 2006