By Steven Rosen
(this originally ran in the Denver Post in Oct. 17, 1998)

It's 1966 all over again in the world of pop music - and the Denver International Film Festival, which just concluded, was in the center of it.

That's because the record "Bob Dylan Live 1966: The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert" was just released this week - some 32 years after the performance.

It was instantly hailed as one of rock's great live recordings. And the publicity surrounding the long-delayed release has interested old and young music lovers in the story of how folk singer Dylan switched to amplified rock 'n' roll in 1965 and 1966. He changed pop culture forever.

By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran on IndieWire's Sundance Blog in January. Both films are now in theatrical release.)

When you see as many movies in as short a time as one does at Sundance, you start to make odd connections between them. Shared themes begin to emerge between the strangest cinematic bedfellows.

Like, for instance, Werner Herzog?s harrowing, sobering ?Grizzly Man? documentary and Mike Mills? offbeat, gently comic ?Thumbsucker,? adapted from a novel by Walter Kim. ?Grizzly Man? is in the World Documentary competition; ?Thumbsucker? in the American Dramatic section.

Both are about males who find comfort in the kind of familiar safe objects that insecure children traditionally use. Only they stick with it a little longer than society usually recommends. And, perhaps, they then transfer their needs onto something else ? something more dangerous.

"How the Western Was Won
Sergio Leone's spaghetti legacy celebrated at a Los Angeles Museum"

By Steven Rosen

It would be fitting if Los Angeles' Autry National Center called itself the Museum With No Name.

For that name, or lack of, would go with its current exhibit - "Once Upon a Time in Italy - The Westerns of Sergio Leone."

Italian film director Leone is most famous for transforming TV actor Clint Eastwood into the enduringly mythic Man With No Name in a series of three mid-1960s "spaghetti Westerns": "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."