Sergio Leone Archives

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Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

Albums March 14, 2025 0

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums February 28, 2025 0

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums February 27, 2025 0

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Albums February 22, 2025 1

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums February 21, 2025 0

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Behind the Song June 25, 2015 0

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Behind the Song July 20, 2016 2

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art August 12, 2015 21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Behind the Song October 19, 2014 2

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

Behind the Song March 23, 2017 0

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 22, 2025 0

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 15, 2025 0

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 7, 2025 0

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 21, 2024 0

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 14, 2024 0

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

American Cinema October 26, 2019 0

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Five teenagers take a road trip to visit an old family homestead in the musty heart of Texas. The radio plays the news, a grim recitation of industrial and environmental disasters and acts of wanton violence. They discuss astrology, retrograde planets and the malevolent influence of Saturn; stop off at the gravesite of a deceased grandfather amid reports of grave robbing; and after passing a slaughterhouse for beef cattle, they pick up a hitchhiker...

North by Northwest (1959)

American Cinema July 8, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.

Parasite (2019)

Movies February 4, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A family of four live in a cramped and roach-infested banjiha, a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They crib free Wi-Fi from unsuspecting neighbours and a nearby coffee shop, and their only source of income, procured by the mother Chung-sook via WhatsApp, comes from the folding of pizza boxes for a local delivery service, a task at which they are only moderately successful...

Paris, Texas (1984)

American Cinema March 5, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother...

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

American Cinema August 10, 2019 0

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - The hotly anticipated follow-up to what has already become a cult classic, in John Wick: Chapter 2 our eponymous hero goes to Rome, as the series curiously begins taking cues from Dan Brown and all things Da Vinci. There's a dash of Underworld mixed in there too: this is a world where neon store fronts, modern art installations, subways and the original film's streamlined desire for vengeance butt up against cobbled streets and catacombs...

World Cinema

The Assassin (2015)

Movies February 18, 2016 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 9th century China, the weakened Tang Dynasty struggles to retain control over its militarised province of Weibo. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained by the nun Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu) to assassinate corrupt government officials, but though she possesses all of the art, she cannot bring herself to kill a man as he sits cradling his sleeping son. So Jiaxin, who has raised Yinniang from the age of ten, sets her charge a more personal task...

Young Adult (2011)

Movies September 9, 2015 1

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a 37-year-old ghostwriter for a series of young adult novels soon to be cancelled, returns to her small Minnesota hometown, angling to hook up with her old high school flame, who is married and has just become a father. Her attempts at seduction are already inappropriate, but prove much grosser than this, culminating in a blowout at a birthday party...

Chinatown (1974)

American Cinema August 25, 2019 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Chinatown is a detective story, loosely inspired by the California water wars which took place between the fledgeling city of Los Angeles and the surrounding Owens Valley in the early twentieth century. The pivotal figure in those wars was William Mulholland, the chief architect of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, whose career came to an abrupt end with the failure of the St Francis Dam in 1928...

Amazing Grace (2018)

American Cinema October 15, 2019 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. The acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack was tasked with shooting the performance for a feature...

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Movies September 25, 2019 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Winfried Conradi is so given to practical jokes that he practically depends on them. When he opens the door of his home in the spa town of Aachen, he regales the postman with an elaborate deception featuring look-alike brothers, prison terms, erotic magazines, and mail bombs, tipping the postman for any distress accrued and to make amends for his own strange excesses. He carries a pair of false teeth...

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

Earthy Anecdotes April 21, 2021 1

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

American Cinema October 21, 2020 0

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

Earthy Anecdotes November 23, 2016 0

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

Earthy Anecdotes May 29, 2015 0

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

Art February 14, 2013 0

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk

Literature April 17, 2013 1

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Literature February 22, 2013 1

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Literature October 6, 2014 0

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)

Literature September 5, 2015 0

Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...

James Joyce

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

American Cinema May 25, 2017 2

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

James Joyce March 14, 2013 1

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Daily Visual June 16, 2015 0

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps

James Joyce February 15, 2016 2

When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...

Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83

Cultureteca June 16, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8 The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85

Cultureteca September 1, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...

Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old

Cultureteca November 11, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8 The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on...

Biz Markie, the Clown Prince of Hip Hop, Dies at 57 Years Old

Cultureteca July 19, 2021 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aofoBrFNdg The rapper, DJ, and record producer Biz Markie died...

Subscribe to Culturedarm

A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

placeholder text

€

MonthlyAnnually

Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

Albums March 14, 2025 0

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

Albums February 28, 2025 0

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Albums February 27, 2025 0

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Albums February 22, 2025 1

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Albums February 21, 2025 0

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

Behind the Song March 23, 2017 0

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

Behind the Song February 9, 2016 0

'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album: Pitchfork placed Low at number 1 on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 1970s', on Q's list of the '100 Greatest British Albums Ever' Low was Bowie's highest entry at number 14, and while...

Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Behind the Song October 19, 2014 2

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

Art August 12, 2015 21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

American Cinema May 25, 2017 2

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 22, 2025 0

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 15, 2025 0

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Tracks of the Week January 7, 2025 0

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 21, 2024 0

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

Tracks of the Week August 14, 2024 0

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

Diego Maradona (2019)

Football December 2, 2020 0

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - One of the successes of Diego Maradona lies in how it manages to restore some of the luxe hedonism and heady momentum to a story so often shrouded by bloated excess. A keenly self-conscious Maradona pushes himself through sporting triumphs and binge cycles, as the barrio boy from Buenos Aires in the slum city of Naples embraces the fur coats and neon lights.

Uncut Gems (2019)

American Cinema June 5, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.

Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)

American Cinema March 12, 2019 0

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Three Men and a Baby is more than a guilty pleasure, it's one of the defining movies of the 1980s for the easy chemistry between its three leads, and for the panoply of fashion, interior design, and architectural styles it affords, an unconstrained movement of plaids and pastels under the neon lights and glass hallways of their luxe apartment and out in the bustling parks and streets of New York...

The Rules of the Game (1939)

The Movie Review October 21, 2020 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Instead Renoir produced a bawdy comedy with French airs and graces, which seems to share much in common with so many American films of the late thirties with their loose morals, gender distortions, and hedonistic flushes of romance. The inspirations may have been Marivaux and Beaumarchais, but in style and temperament The Rules of the Game rubs up equally alongside The Philadelphia Story and the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks.

Pickpocket (1959)

The Movie Review January 26, 2025 0

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Michel the titular character of Robert Bresson's snappily downcast Pickpocket is a renegade, a nihilist, one of cinema's Nietzschean Übermensch and most of all a real churl. He is the surliest of apostates with the hint of a bad boy persona that might suggest Marlon Brando or James Dean in blocking or on the amateur stage, for as is Bresson's wont the lead Martin LaSalle was a rank novice...

World Cinema

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Movies November 9, 2019 0

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - On the morning of Saint Valentine's Day, 1900, the schoolgirls boarding at Appleyard College prepare for a day picnicking at Hanging Rock. In raptures they recite poetry from the Valentine's cards they have presumably sent one another; they put on their muslin dresses, and in a cross between a balletic embrace and an evolutionary procession, they awkwardly help each other with their corsets; and then they are off, but at the rock three of them vanish...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

American Cinema October 3, 2019 0

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In February 1969 in Hollywood, fading television star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) frequents bars and gets ferried around by his old stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Booth lives in a trailer with his pit bull Brandy, in an empty lot behind the drive-in in Van Nuys, but Dalton keeps up appearances with a luxury home in Beverly Crest overlooking Beverly Hills...

Cactus Flower (1969)

American Cinema March 13, 2018 0

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - More than mere confection, which by nature lies there enticingly and dwindles the more that we eat, and just like the titular cactus which sits on dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson's desk, cannily marking her transformation, Cactus Flower positively blossoms. The third film in three years from director Gene Saks - hot on the heels of two resounding Neil Simon success stories...

Uncut Gems (2019)

American Cinema June 5, 2020 0

Hard Eight (1996)

American Cinema July 21, 2018 0

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent...