Dierks Bentley won't be sporting a cowboy hat when he walks on stage Sunday, Oct. 3, as headliner of the 2004 Fallfest at Long's Park. "I don't wear cowboy hats," Bentley said in a telephone interview from his hotel room in Jonesboro, Ark....

The country music format, which surged in popularity in the early 1990s and peaked in 1995 at more than 40 million listeners, has maintained its popularity during the past three years, a new study finds. In fact, country music is "steadily trending up"--and...

When a director has been as condemned and lionized as Sam Peckinpah has, it’s inevitable that the legend obscures the work. So rather than add to the heap of writing that already exists about Peckinpah’s balletic violence, or about the stunted career and mangled movies...

When a director has been as condemned and lionized as Sam Peckinpah has, it’s inevitable that the legend obscures the work. So rather than add to the heap of writing that already exists about Peckinpah’s balletic violence, or about the stunted career and mangled...

Ride the High Country was a sensitive, modest film, but Peckinpah has aimed much higher this time. The Wild Bunch is not a minor film; it's a sprawling, spectacular, ambitious, wilfully controversial picture, an assault on [an] audience's senses and emotions, an aggressive bid for the spotlight. Fortunately, the film deserves the spotlight. Its first impression is literally over-powering; The Wild Bunch is much more dazzling than Ride the High Country, but it loses some of the reflective quali...

After viewing Ride the High Country, Jean Renoir remarked that "Mr. Peckinpah knows much about the music of the soul." But this could have been said even more accurately about The Ballad of Cable Hogue, because "the music of the soul" is really what it's all about. What Sam Peckinpah tried to do in this film was illuminate the essence, the soul of his characters—not through the realistic rendering of character and event, but by "objectifying" their var...

From [an] unlikely source comes an almost perfectly realised little film called Guns in the Afternoon [released in the United States as Ride the High Country] …, directed by Sam Peckinpah…. Sentimental moviegoers … are going to get quite a lot more than they bargained for: a movie full of intelligence, quiet charm, and thorough understanding of its materials…. [What is so attractive about the film] is the intelligent way in which the direction and dialogue handle and exploit [the...