By Vadim Rizov [ Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2009 begins today. Screenings are held at both The Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center. Click venue names for more information.] If you need to be told that Claire Denis' latest, 35 Shots Of Rum is essential viewing, you might want to skip it...

By Vadim Rizov [ Dillinger is Dead opens today for a one-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Click here for screening information.] Dillinger is Dead opens with worker Glauco (Michel Piccoli) at the gas-mask factory. As someone stands in a poisonous gas chamber testing out his latest pr...

By Vadim Rizov Film Forum's double-feature of Man's Castle and American Madness (playing February 7th, 8th, and 9th) offers an easy, quick way to watch two rarely-screened, hard-to-find 30s films in one sitting. It's also a chance to contemplate two different kinds of emotional intensity from two ve...

By Vadim Rizov [ Coraline is now playing in wide release.] How awesome is Coraline? So awesome. That's the Twitter review, and that's really all that needs to be said up front. Coraline is that rarest of creatures, the PG-rated kids' movie with no big scares (there's one "boo" moment, but it's prett...

By Vadim Rizov According to a quick check, this column has now been up 22 times since October 2007, which indicates that the month-long gaps between installments are no longer the anomalies I was hoping they would turn out to be and pretty much have become the norm. This means we're into February an...

The problem with broken group commit was discusses many times, bug report http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=13669 was reported 3.5 years ago and still not fixed in MySQL 5.0 / 5.1 (and most likely will not be in MySQL 5.1). Although the rough truth is this bug is very hard (if possible) to fix proper...

By Vadim Rizov [ Warning: In the end-of-year rush to hear everything, make a mix and generally be done with this damn year, this column is especially long, bloated, and prone to skipping back and forth between strangely long and kind of short and ludicrously inadequate capsules.] *** Neon Neon's cur...

By Vadim Rizov I know I keep coming up with constant excuses for this column's (to put it politely) somewhat irregular publishing schedule, but this one I need to make. Briefly: The Onion AV Club is in the thick of its year-end process, which meant I just couldn't pass up the chance to make a year-e...

By Vadim Rizov Today I will begin by tearing apart the adjective "non-confrontational." Because music criticism is, in so many watery cliched variations on "dancing about architecture," one of the harder things to do without resorting to either endless comparisons, unhelpful technicalities, or purpl...

By Vadim Rizov [ The Key screens this afternoon and evening as part of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's William Holden retrospective. Click here for screening details.] When Film Forum recently announced an upcoming David Lean retrospective, I had two reactions: excitement, but also puzzlement t...