Savage Life 3 (Trill)
The Baton Rouge, La., rapper Webbie has the laziest sort of charm. He didn’t even take time to come up with a newish title for this, his third solo album, and he certainly doesn’t agonize over his lyrics.
Almost a decade ago he emerged in tandem with the far more fiery and intricate [...]
The producer of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol forced the star to perform some pretty hairy stunts. But since Tom Cruise is the producer (and star) of this fourth feature-film spinoff of the ’60s TV series, we can assume that he wanted to assert his limber muscularity as he approaches 50. So here he is, [...]
Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) peaked early. At her rural Minnesota high school she was the prom queen and Superior Blond Being, and clever enough to think she might become a famous writer. All the girls wanted to be her; all the boys wanted to bed her. Back then, Mavis ran with that other species of [...]
THE ART OF FIELDING
By Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Company, $25.99.
At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach’s expansive, allusive first novel combines the pleasures of an old-fashioned baseball story with a stately, self-reflective meditation on [...]
If you love Wallace & Gromit, the series of shorts that established Aardman as the wittiest people to ever play with clay, then Arthur Christmas may seem a disconcertingly different animal.
A little girl writes to Santa and asks some age old Christmas questions, including the one about time management — how does Santa get to [...]
The Greek epic earned $32 million its first weekend, but Modern Warfare 3 did $400 million its first day—so who’s the champion of the young-male demographic?
Immortals, the Greco-roamin’ wrestling match starring Henry Cavill as Theseus and Mickey Rourke as Hyperion, king of the sadists, took the top spot at North American theaters with $32 million, [...]
The cartoon cat burglar filched first place from Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy’s crime caper, and left the Asian stoners Harold & Kumar feeling dopey
A little cat shall lead them. Puss in Boots stayed atop the hot tin roof of the North American box office, winning the weekend with $33 million, according to preliminary studio [...]
If men are funnier than women, then it’s not by much — and mostly just to other men. Such is the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, who judged comic wit by asking students to write original captions for New Yorker cartoons.
Setting aside the fact that writing [...]
In Real Steel, Dreamworks’ lavishly photographed deadbeat-dad redemption story, retired boxer and practicing flim-flam man Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) explains the origin of robot boxing to his long-lost 11-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo). The action is set in the near future, sometime after 2016 (the exact year is vague). He and Max are reluctantly reunited [...]
Noel Gallagher is in the dressing room at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, England. It’s August 11, 1996, and he and his band Oasis have just played the second of two 125,000-capacity concerts — events that would prove to be the high-water mark for British rock music in both the 1990s and subsequent decade.
Like everyone else [...]
