For five years, the Chicago band Pinetop Seven has earned a reputation as an enigmatic art-country (not alt-country) collective, working in a mysterious attic rehearsal space as a small revolving cast plays wrenching, haunted, indefinable music. Its publicity photos artfully blurred, Pinetop Seven is...

THE 'original-is-best' camp will be thrilled by hip new macs from Mackintosh. They're still made from vulcanised cotton by specially trained craftsmen. 'Stiletto', shown left, uses a print from Liberty archives. [pounds sterling]450, Liberty 020 7529 5955; other stockists 01236 723 338....

When Jane Campion was honored onstage at the Cannes Film Festival with about 30 other major directors Sunday, she was the lone woman of the bunch. And she's still not used to how strange that feels.The New Zealander is the only woman filmmaker to have...

Female directors are flooding today's theaters more than ever, with movies as diverse as the women themselves. Yet the struggle for equality, recognition and respect continues.Moving beyond the traditional female arena of romantic comedies, these new films range from Kasi Lemmons' critical smash "Talk to...

If ["Seven Beauties"] is to be taken for mere entertainment, I must state my disgust that the abomination of genocide and the tortures and degradations of the concentration camp are used as a special, uniquely macabre titillation to enhance its effectiveness. But I believe that Lina Wertmüller, the director, had more in mind, even though at certain moments the opportunities her story offered for sophisticated deathhouse comedy may have carried her away…. I also believe that �...

["Seven Beauties"] is a grotesque vaudeville show. It's one act after another, with political labels stuck on the participants so you'll know what you're watching. The players come on at a sprint; they're overly spirited—the juice of life oozes out all over the place in a chorus of "Mamma mia"s. Wertmüller dances around with a hand-held camera and hauls the acts offstage fast, swinging from pathos to burlesque so that audiences won'...

"Man in disorder—that's the only hope," announces a cherubic prisoner in Seven Beauties; and this about defines the breadth, if not the sophistication, of Lina Wertmuller's polemic thus far…. [She] deplores Hitler (and Mussolini) and is out of sorts with a System that traps her wide-eyed little man … somewhere between freely willed and predestined chagrin. Her throbbing camera is also not so secretly in love with this socio-political System, just as her neore...