The La Mesa Police Department’s Citizens Academy is, in the words of training sergeant Kate Lynch, “a great way to share the unfortunate realities of the job without putting citizens in harm’s way. It helps …

King David is holding court today, even after suffering the bites of at least nine King Cobras. The court is the one used for handball in Chicano Park; the King Cobras are malt liquors. His …

“No Aunt May, no Spider-Man,” says my brother, and I know what he means. Without that frail and innocent soul that quietly cries out for protection and sacrifice on its behalf, Spider-Man loses a chunk …

I’m of the opinion that “B movie” stopped having much useful meaning some time ago, certainly by the time the Transformers series became the box-office juggernaut that it is today — or was, until its …

The professional and personal collaboration that is Wrensilva audio began at a Supersuckers show at the Casbah. Debra Salyer didn’t know the band, and found herself stranded in a mosh pit during a cover of …

Today, in its long sliver of a factory facing a North Park alley, Wrensilva audio produces, in the words of co-founder Scott Salyer, “the best console ever built” for playing music. “Nobody’s ever done anything …

I Have Purchased a Grey Cardigan Sweater My wife and I fell in love over wine, bourbon, and cognac. We attended a college with a dry campus, and many evenings were spent sitting in my …

47 Meters Down has girls and sharks, All Eyez on Me has rappers and racist cops, Beatriz at Dinner has a high-tension, high-end dinner party, The Book of Henry has boys and brutality and bullets, …

Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan all get turns in the cinematic spotlight this week in a monster movie, the story of a dog and his girl, an expat drama, and a war doc, respectively. Some …

Twenty-five-year-old Maurice DJ Ayodam is wearing a white tank top, a midnight-blue velour Adidas track suit, and a custom Breitling watch — custom because he took it to a jeweler and had the face ringed …

It’s not that Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves, not entirely, anyway. (That would be, like, crazy. The kind of Brave New World you’d see laid out in a blistering manifesto.) Dudes still have a …

This year, the Media Arts Center San Diego has taken over production of the iVIE Awards & Student Film Festival, a program started in 2001 “to encourage and reward teachers who utilize video as a …

Gnarly: difficult, dangerous, or challenging. The challenge of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales? To make poor old Johnny Depp appealing again. Annnnd...nope. The difficulty of Baywatch: to make a successful R-rated …

When horror maestro William Castle parked ambulances outside theaters showing Macabre in 1958, it was a publicity stunt. Today, it would be called experiential marketing, and the operation might well be handled by Hadley Media …

It happens. Rob Logic, owner of the Bancroft in Spring Valley, can rattle off a list, starting with the time in 1964 when James Nelson Spencer smashed his Pontiac Bonneville through the front door of …

I’m probably more fascinated by H.R. Giger and his xenomorph than is entirely healthy, so it took me a little while to get over the fact that the aliens aren’t really the star, or even …

University Avenue is improving. Between 70th and Baltimore, La Mesa is “maximizing walkability and creating a unifying streetscape theme” by installing trees along the sidewalks, amending crosswalks, updating street lights, and most significantly, planting the …

Obit, Vanessa Gould’s documentary look at the obituary department of the New York Times in action, is as deceptive in tone as it is perceptive in vision. A strange air of calm rumination pervades the …

Jay’s daughter has osteosarcoma — “cancer of the bone. She had to have her leg amputated. It also tries to travel to your heart and lungs, and it’s ongoing. They actually prescribed cannabis for her …

In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of …

Doug Liman’s The Wall pits two American soldiers (John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the latter looking like Jake Gyllenhaal and talking like Casey Affleck and acquitting himself admirably) against an Iraqi sniper in the pipelined, …

“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you …

Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she …

On Receiving a Death’s Head Rosary Some twenty years ago, I was eighteen And being young, I knew I’d never die And came to Rome, the oldest place I’d seen And in St. Mary’s church, …

Uh-oh. You’ve got America’s Most Beloved Actor (TM) Tom Hanks plus Emma Watson, the star of 2017’s biggest hit (Beauty and the Beast), in a techno-thriller designed to push everyone’s buttons about the companies whose …

In 1983, teenaged San Diegan Ken Layne had a revelation in Death Valley. “The teenage boys in my crowd would take whoever’s car that was working that weekend” — often, it was restaurateur Sam Chammas’s …

By early April, the Anza-Borrego superbloom was all but over. Yellow puffs of blooming brittlebush still dotted the mountains on approach, and orange-petaled spindles still tipped the ocotillos’ tall tendrils, but the carpet of flowers …

Have you forgotten that the Katherine Heigl crazy-ex thriller Unforgettable opens today? Probably not, because you probably never knew it in the first place. Hey-o! But here’s what’s really unforgettable: Scott Marks liked it. Full …

“Why is Anne Hathaway the most hated star in Hollywood?” is just one of the first-page results when you google “Anne Hathaway Hollywood.” The others are similar. It’s almost enough to make you love her …

Artists are a famously difficult bunch: if they’re not wreaking havoc as they wrestle their demons into something fit for public consumption, then they’re plundering everyone and everything around them in service of their precious …

Look at my eyes now Pastor Robus of God’s Real Church — abused child, former Hells Angel, prison rape victim, two-time mental patient, twice divorced, and successful businessman who left it behind when God appeared …

If you are a certain sort of enterprising soul — that is, the sort who doesn’t want to pay for stuff — you can find the video of Werner Herzog’s masterclass in filmmaking out there …

Director and co-writer Ido Fluk’s The Ticket stars a lean and hungry Dan Stevens as James, a blind man who recovers his sight and immediately sets his sights on the horizon. The way he sees …

I like to tell myself that I go into every film with a completely open mind, ready to praise or blame based entirely on what I am about to witness onscreen. But that’s not always …

Amazon’s got everything, but some illusions must be kept alive.

The first sign that The Boss Baby will be a pleasant surprise — and not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at …

Sometimes, life is kind. Not the movie Life, mind you. That wasn’t kind at all, even if it was kinda good. But real life. Your humble correspondent hit a serious low this week, so it’s …

The great grinding gears of the pop culture PR machine would have you believe that Beauty and the Beast is the big movie news this week. But it’s not, and neither are the bleats of …

Director Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending adapts Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning novel about an aging Englishman named Tony (Jim Broadbent) who is gently forced to reckon with his past — in particular, the …

The Disney live-action Beauty and the Beast opens this week. It stars Emma Watson from the Harry Potter movies. You are almost certainly familiar with both the movie and its star, and you probably know …

Starting with the end, then: both Kong: Skull Island and Land of Mine take place in the aftermath of war. Kong is set just as America is pulling out of Vietnam, leaving Sergeant Sam Jackson …

Writer-director Martin Zandlivet’s terse, tense, and terrific post-WWII film Land of Mine establishes two of its three strengths immediately. First, star Roland Møller as Danish sergeant Carl Rasmussen, his eyes radiating barely controlled emotion from …

I liked the superhero movie Logan a lot, mostly because it was less about superheroes and more about keeping the flame of faith alive as the darkness closes in and about keeping civilization going by …

With 2013’s The Wolverine, director James Mangold took a near-immortal, adamantium-clawed (thanks to a combination of mutation and rogue science) superhero named Logan and stuck him in a Big Sleep–style mystery movie. The results were...unimpressive. …

In A United Kingdom, a black man falls in love with a white woman, and their romance is tested by all sorts of opposing forces. In Get Out, a black man falls in love with …

There is no delight in being contrary for its own sake. It's as dishonest a critical move as quote-whore cheerleading. It cries out, "Hey, look at me!" when, of course, a critic's job is to …

Growing up in Chicago, Richie Keen would ride his bike down to where John Hughes was shooting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and sneak onto the set. Later, he started as an actor before becoming a …

With Pirates of the Caribbean, Gore Verbinski took a silly-spooky theme park attraction and built it into a multibillion-dollar defense of bucking the system and living by your wits. With A Cure for Wellness, he …

First things first: the 2017 San Diego Jewish Film Festival is underway, and runs through the 17th. Film lineup is here. I rather like the cutline: "Our Lives Projected." Between that and the first San …

If You’re Making Art and Getting Paid for It...Decorate this cover and you could win $100! Get details.“People used to say, ‘Oh, I love your music; I put it on when I go to sleep.’ …