Email Author Laura Sinagra

2004 Stories by Laura Sinagra

• As a Grieving Mother, Weaver Chases Pot and an Oscar Nod

  published December 7, 2004

  Last year, award nominators declared Diane Keaton's ditzy playwright in Something's Gotta Give a juicy role for a woman of a certain age.... More >>

• Spain's High-Flying, Deep-Sea-Diving Quadriplegic Poet-Hero

  published December 7, 2004

  Based on the chastened life and hastened death of Spanish euthanasia activist Ramón Sampedro, the painterly biopic The Sea Inside... More >>

• Film

  published November 9, 2004

  With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights... More >>

• Docs Examine Culture Wars From Kansas to Kabul

  published November 2, 2004

  For anybody still wondering what's the matter with Kansas, Howard Goldberg's Being Dorothy offers some insight into the civic life of... More >>

• Film

  published November 2, 2004

  Maybe these two music docs balance each other out—You See Me Laughin' imagines a niche audience hungry for profiles of obscure Delta... More >>

• Rapper-Mogul Fulfills Prophecies, Enjoys Early Retirement

  published October 26, 2004

  The deepest moments in this chronicle of Jay-Z's 2003 Madison Square Garden "retirement" concert come via clips of the megastar working up his... More >>

• Remembering a White Casualty of the Civil Rights Struggle

  published October 19, 2004

  This doc recounting the tragic story of Viola Liuzzo, the only white woman killed during the civil rights struggle, doubles as a narrative of the... More >>

• Film

  published October 12, 2004

  This documentation of the Scorsese-catalyzed 2003 Tribute to the Blues concert at Radio City offers a bumper crop of tasty bits. Performances both... More >>

• Film

  published September 28, 2004

  The God-squad answer to Todd Graff's Camp, this after-church special finds chaste cover girl Hilary Duff playing a red-state songbird who,... More >>

• Almost Famous: Two Indie Bands Struggle to Survive the Industry and Each Other

  published September 21, 2004

  In 1994, Minneapolis's City Pages ran a cover story about the "privileged poor"—bohemian kids moving in from the burbs to haunt... More >>

• Film

  published September 21, 2004

  This movie industry spoof casts Alec Baldwin as an FBI agent who plans to bust a graft ring by posing as a film producer and cutting a mobbed-up... More >>

• Film

  published September 14, 2004

  You have to be a special kind of filmmaker to look at post–9-11 Afghanistan and find its chaos and suffering a great backdrop for your macho... More >>

• Film

  published September 7, 2004

  Filmed in 2002, Jennifer Elster's first feature, about artistic exorcism of childhood demons, transcends its own considerable self-indulgence with... More >>

• All About My Father: A Son Tries to Finish His Dad's Secret Work

  published August 31, 2004

  This semi-autobiographical story of an affluent São Paulo stock speculator who loses his job amid the '90s market downturn seems at first... More >>

• Film

  published August 31, 2004

  Though these festivals of short works both include Jojo in the Stars, British animator Marc Craste's near wordless tale of love between two... More >>

• Breath Fed

  published August 24, 2004

  On 1997's Homogenic, Björk bellowed, "I thought I could organize freedom/How Scandinavian of me/You sussed it out, didn't you?" She... More >>

• Delicate Balance

  published August 3, 2004

  Laura Dern has certainly played her share of head cases, but in John Curran's marital roundelay We Don't Live Here Anymore, her character... More >>

• Film

  published August 3, 2004

  Spanning basically the same era as The Fog of War, Mark Moormann's biopic of late jazz and rock producer-pioneer Tom Dowd bursts similarly... More >>

• Film

  published July 27, 2004

  The gripping credit sequence that kicks off this tale of South Africa's most famous bank robber takes an aerial view of class disparity in 1976... More >>

• Film

  published July 27, 2004

  Merzak Allouache (1994's Bab el-Oued City) continues mining Algerian identity, both North African and French. The Other World (2001)... More >>

• Film

  published July 20, 2004

  This 2000 Iranian film, like the recent Afghan Osama, follows the struggles of a young girl forced to impersonate a boy to support her... More >>

• A Band Apart

  published June 29, 2004

  As they release Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, a chronicle of Metallica's two years in therapy, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky are... More >>

• Scary Movie

  published June 22, 2004

  Like Eddie Murphy in that old Saturday Night Live skit, the bumbling FBI agents played by Marlon and Shawn Wayans in White Chicks go... More >>

• Film

  published June 22, 2004

  If you're sad that Reagan Week is over and just can't get enough of Americans with the darndest sense of optimism, hired-gun commercial and PSA... More >>

• Photo Ops

  published June 1, 2004

  Forget The Swan—the increasing ease of digital image capture and distribution ensured that the year's most gruesomely riveting reality... More >>