Author Archives: Henry Connelly

This article has been corrected. You may view this article’s correction here. In most instances and for most people, discovering a fleshy torso-shaped object wrapped in an oversized garbage bag in the back of a friend’s car does not immediately conjure thoughts of a delicious meal. Even knowing what it was, I couldn’t help making »

There is a room inside Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion that has three televisions in it. The decadence of the arrangement must have been extraordinarily impressive at the time. The King raised the bar for the television to available wall space ratio. In the modern age, however, standards have changed. The interior designers of the Lansdowne »

No genre has as much baggage as a Western: The label instantly conjures a set of narrow thematic and narrative formulas. After all, when was the last time a director set a movie in the wild Western frontier just because he liked the outfits? The utterly peculiar character of that place and time is too »

Spring, it would seem, has brought rebirth to University Properties as well as the trees. For more than a year, the space that once held Rainbow Café lay vacant and barren. Last night, however, that finally changed. A new sushi restaurant, the somewhat unimaginatively titled Sushi on Chapel, will now try to thrive in a »

He speaks to the audacity of hope, but doesn’t follow through when it counts. He raises expectations he will not meet and makes promises that he cannot keep — or at least his menu does. Though we may be swept up by our desire to believe, Head Chef David Foster of Foster’s Restaurant offers only »

To describe “Rambo” as “violent” is to insult the civility of excessively violent movies everywhere. For while the blood and guts in a film like “Final Destination” may be hilariously over the top, “Rambo” is simply beyond the pale. 236 people die in this movie, and no one goes easy. As a technical matter, the »

It’s Friday night, and you have a powerful hankering for Mexican food. A friend recommends Bulldog Burrito, but your restless soul hungers for more. You know what you value in a Mexican restaurant: distance from campus. If nothing else, C.O. Jones provides that much, located at 969 State St., two blocks past Modern Apizza. Unfortunately, »

For most Japanese restaurants, the sake bomb is a necessary evil — a Western perversion of the honored sake-drinking ritual that brings in droves of college-aged customers all too ready to lose track of the bill in their loud and messy pursuit of inebriation. Even at Samurai, New Haven’s pre-eminent sake bombing institution, the wait »

Few will forget the steamy and explicit sex scene between Eva Mendes and Joaquin Phoenix that begins “We Own the Night,” but the rest of the film fails to maintain the same level of excitement. Phoenix plays nightclub manager Bobby Green, who hides his policemen brother and father from his fast-living friends. After a hit »

Nobody was expecting “Sydney White” to be “Citizen Kane.” After all, a movie transplanting the “Snow White” fairy tale to the wild-and-crazy college world and starring Amanda Bynes doesn’t exactly scream great cinema. Nor does the fact that director Joe Nussbaum’s greatest prior work was “American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile.” Yet sometimes abysmally low »

Now I know what it is like to be a Red Sox fan. Not the insight I was expecting after seeing “3:10 to Yuma,” the new western from director James Mangold (“Walk the Line”). And yet the experience of having such a wonderfully nuanced movie crumble at the moment of climax has brought me as »