Ken Burns

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Review: Gingko Blue

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.
Getting the tone of a cocktail bar just right
By BRIAN DUFF | October 28, 2011

Paging Chicken Little

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
City motivated to panic; Making things better; close encounter of the weird kind
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | October 07, 2011

Prohibition drinking game!

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.
Play along with the upcoming Ken Burns documentary
By CHRIS FARAONE | September 30, 2011

Review: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

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.
Joseph Dorman's portrait of Aleichem
By PETER KEOUGH | September 02, 2011

Errol Morris's magnificent obsessions

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 Laca
Mr. Natural
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | July 15, 2011

Review: Pontine explores Hawthorne's ancestral thriller

Perhaps nowhere in America is the past as tangible a presence as it is in New England.
Spirit world
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 30, 2011

Getting the story

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
Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux sing jazz's many strains
By JON GARELICK | December 04, 2009

PODCAST: Scout Tufankjian on Making History with Barack Obama; Ken Burns on the Art of Documentary

VIDEO: Scout Tufankjian on Barack Obama's historic presidential campaignIt's been a year since that night in Chicago, which for photographer SCOUT TUFANKJIAN was the end...
By Carly Carioli | November 04, 2009

Interview: Ken Burns

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.
On his latest PBS documentary, The National Parks
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 25, 2009

Holy landscape!

Ken Burns worships America's spiritual resource
Ken Burns worships America's spiritual resource
By CLIF GARBODEN | September 25, 2009

Photos: The National Parks: America's Best Idea

Scenes from The National Parks: America's Best Idea , a six-part, 12-hour film by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, George Masa.
Images from Ken Burns's latest documentary
By PHOENIX STAFF | September 25, 2009

The National Parks: America's Best Idea

The other big film event of the night is at Merrill Auditorium, where the patron saint of historical documentary miniseries, Ken Burns, hits 20 Myrtle...
By webteam | August 05, 2009

Tours of duty

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."
John Clifford and Billy Bang's Vietnam; plus Icons Among Us and bye-bye Jazz Brunch
By JON GARELICK | May 22, 2009

Review: Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

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.
Legacy Edition
By TED DROZDOWSKI | December 09, 2008

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

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

The long view

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

The Cool School

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

Free speech!

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

Sexual Halen

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

Dynasty

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

The War is swell

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

In praise of four-letter words

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

Right turns

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

Film noir or red meat?

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.
And Ric Burns’s Warhol documentary
By GERALD PEARY | September 12, 2006

Monkey see, monkey do

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: Confront
Into the cute at the DeCordova
By CHRISTOPHER MILLIS | September 12, 2006

Sketchy

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

CSA: The Confederate States of America

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

New to DVD for the week of January 13, 2006

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

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