By Rex Reed 2/14/12 8:02pm

movies

Schoenaerts, juiced up on his (and his cattle’s) own supply.

Bullhead Offers Belgian Bovine Brawn

Competing for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar, the Belgian entry Bullhead is pretty much what experience has taught me is a characteristic example of filmmaking from Belgium—a dark, gruesome, sickening but extremely original work that is both repellent and fascinating. It’s about a vicious, bullying cattle farmer named Jacky who swings a shady deal with a Mafia meat trader that results in the murder of a federal cop investigating the use of illegal hormones in meat-packing plants. Jacky is played with ferocious power by coarse, craggy newcomer Matthias Schoenaerts, whose brawny, menacing swagger masks a sad, desperate emptiness that reminds me of the first time the screen unveiled the terrifying impact of Ralph Fiennes’s Nazi camp commander in Schindler’s List. Read More

By Mike Taylor 12/06/10 12:54pm

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: Bernanke Hits Prime Time

  • The finance minister of Belgium is saying that maybe it’d be a good idea to expand the European Union’s $1 trillion bailout fund as concerns about the Great Debt Contagion continues to menace Spain and Portugal. [NYT]
  • “Who will audit the auditors?” is a question the Securities and Exchange Commission has Read More

By Leigh Kamping-Carder 8/14/08 4:39pm

New York Belgians Waffle

Thomas Degeest’s Wafels & Dinges truck might just be the perfect metaphor for Belgium. Painted in the country’s colors — red, yellow and black — the truck sells Belgian waffles at several Manhattan locations. It looks patriotic. It flies a Belgian flag out its back window.

But then there’s that name.

"Every time we get Read More

By Andrew Sarris 8/28/06 12:00am

Higher Learning: Half Nelson Wrestles With Drugs, Race

Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, from a screenplay by Mr. Fleck and Anna Boden, plunges us into an inner-city junior high school in Brooklyn, with all its Marxian-dialectical rhetoric blazing away at the comparatively timid, superintendent-mandated civil-rights curriculum. At least, this is the pedagogical approach of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), the school’s parlor-pink, crack-addicted white instructor. Read More

By Andrew Sarris 8/28/06 12:00am

Higher Learning: Half Nelson Wrestles With Drugs, Race

Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, from a screenplay by Mr. Fleck and Anna Boden, plunges us into an inner-city junior high school in Brooklyn, with all its Marxian-dialectical rhetoric blazing away at the comparatively timid, superintendent-mandated civil-rights curriculum. At least, this is the pedagogical approach of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), the school’s parlor-pink, crack-addicted white instructor. Read More

By Terry Golway 1/10/00 12:00am

A Century’s Legacy: War Against Civilians

I spent the last days of the old century reading about the time and place where it all began, it being the now departed 1900′s. Academics and those who wish they were (and even a few who are glad they aren’t) are fond of saying that the 20th century didn’t really begin until a Serbian Read More

By Ralph Gardner Jr. 9/13/99 12:00am

Titian? Nice. But Where’s the Gift Shop?

This space rarely, if ever, runs service pieces. But I feel obligated to share a discovery I made recently that may help parents traveling with children to have more pleasant, culturally enriching vacations. Visit an art exhibition as a family.

I’m not talking about museums such as the Met or the National Gallery in Washington. Read More

By Moira Hodgson 12:00am

Cool Moules at Noisy Markt; Gwyneth Probably Was There

“Belief in progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work.”

–Charles Baudelaire

A Belgian bistro in the farthest western reaches of 14th Street hardly sounds like a likely prospect for a hip new hangout. But moules and frites are in, as anyone Read More