Alexandria Symonds

Lance Hammer, writer and director of Ballast, is a slight, soft-spoken man, a fact that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who sees his first film.

There's at least one occasion on which Julian Jarrold's new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel Brideshead Revisited could be indispensable. If you're assigned the novel for a class, don't want to actually read it, and need to develop a passing familiarity with its basic plot and thematic structures, look no further!

Say what you will about MTV reality shows—call them trashy, exploitative, or amazing—and you’ll probably be right. One indisputable fact, though, is that MTV is incredibly adept at developing the reality villain.

Union Hall is a perfect match for Le Loup. The D.C.-based band is a seven-piece ensemble, and you often get the feeling that its music is just barely contained within its confines—a three-minute song on its excellent debut album The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, or, in this case, a little room in the basement of a neighborhood bar.

Major holidays, as a general rule, make it tough to fill a concert venue. Mondays are also tough. When the two happen to align, you can pretty much guarantee a subdued set.

“Well, the film is about—you don’t know what it’s about,” Meat Loaf says to filmmaker Bruce David Klein in an early on-camera interview in Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise. “That’s what it’s about.”

At first blush, Gus Van Sant’s newest film seems a lot like an extended M83 music video. Paranoid Park explores a Portland skateboarding community in the aftermath of grisly tragedy, with skate scenes shot on Super-8 against a backdrop of dreamy French ambient pop.

“Why do we blog?” asks Dylan, the lead character in the new NBC series, quarterlife, already a series of web episodes and a social networking Web site.

If there’s one striking thing about Sam Simkoff, the front man of D.C. indie collective Le Loup, it’s how he straddles the continuum of time.

Follow the Lights is not a Ryan Adams record; it is a record by a band called The Cardinals, of which Ryan Adams is a member. At least, this is what Adams would like you to think.

Sure, there were plenty of tall, skinny, bespectacled guys at the final concert of Morrissey’s five-night stand in New York at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Sunday night.

You couldn’t go anywhere last week without hearing, or hearing about, M.I.A. “Jimmy” and “Boyz” have been blasting out of headphones on the subway since Kala came out over the summer, and the hype reached new levels as everyone in town clamored to get into her two sold-out shows at the newly-opened Terminal 5.

Though I’d never consciously spent time thinking it over, on some primary level I was pretty sure I had Maury all figured out.

To call the Sigur Rós event at the Alliance Francaise on Saturday a “concert,” without further clarification, would be a disservice to Dean DeBlois, the director of Lilo and Stitch.

The renowned New Yorker Festival had more in store for Columbia students this year than ever before.

It’s been quite a year for baroque-pop wunderkind Patrick Wolf.

Remember The Perfect Score, that absolute blot on Scarlett Johansson’s then-burgeoning career? It’s okay if you don’t—thankfully for Johansson, nobody else does either.

I wanted so badly for Zach Condon to come onstage looking a little bit eccentric.

It takes a very special kind of movie to feature a major montage of orphans taking turns riding a motorcycle with the carefree songs of the sixties swelling in the background.

It’s not as if the author of The English Patient needed another testament to his dexterity at crafting love stories.

If music is a religious experience-and at least one Montreal septet seems intent on proving that it is-then attending an Arcade Fire show is something akin to a trip to Mecca.

Though Ray Lawrence's new film, Jindabyne, may be set in the desolate, barren landscape of rural Australia, it doesn't exactly map uncharted territory in terms of cinema.

After winning a Pulitzer, it's not uncommon for a playwright to go through a period of stagnation.

"The first poem is about conception," Pia Tafdrup explained timidly during her allotted time on the Town Hall stage last Wednesday night, delving immediately and passionately into a first-person poetic narrative of what life was like before it began.

At first glance, Tony Sarg's art book Up & Down New York looks like a particular staple of pediatricians' waiting rooms: Where's Waldo.

It's been a harsh, barren March for fans of The OC, which signed off for good on Feb. 22.

At the outset of Jonathan Lethem's newest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, Lucinda Hoekke and Matthew Plangent meet in an art museum to end their relationship.

To its credit, The Number 23 is better than its trailer makes it out to be.

Ever since October 2001, when Amiri Baraka wrote a poem called "Somebody Blew Up America," controversy has inevitably followed the author around like an annoying, obstinate puppy.

Eric Watson Williams has a hairless, chiseled torso, and the world needs to see it.

"You can be the first to report on this," Eli Horowitz, the managing editor of the San Francisco publishing house McSweeney's, said across the three-hour time difference.

Imagine being arrested for prostitution or disturbing the peace. The officer seems vaguely familiar, and a glance at his lapel confirms your suspicion-it's that guy from Chips! Or Ozzy Osbourne's son! Or one of the Jackson siblings! At first, the premise of CBS's newest experiment in prime-time absurdity, Armed and Famous, sounds like the love child of Cops and Dancing with the Stars.