‘Italian Studies’ Review: Alone in New York with Amnesia

With the first two features, “Give Me the Booty” (2013) and “The Vagrants” (2017), writer-director Adam Leon has carved out an admirable niche as a chronicler of unsupervised and sometimes helpless urban youth. His last painting is stretching a bit for “Italian Studies” and yields mixed results. The movie begins in London, where Alina (Vanessa …

Pat Martino, Jazz Guitarist Who Transcended Amnesia, has died at the age of 77.

Jazz is a way of life,” he said. “This is not a musical idiom. Jazz is spontaneous. If you leave your house with nowhere to go and simply walk for pleasure, observing and looking around, you will find that you are improvising.” And he said he didn’t consider himself a “guitar player,” but once he …

‘Yakuza Princess’ Review: Crime, Amnesia, and Ancient Swords

You know he wasn’t kidding from the opening scene of this movie. Set in “20 years ago” Osaka, the blue-colored sequence depicts a solemn ceremony that is shattered by bloody gun-assisted assassinations and ends with a young boy putting a bullet in the neck. That’s why when I say “he’s not kidding” I mean “he …