Don't listen to the kids with the mohawks. Punk is totally dead. For bands like the Black Halos, the best way to deal with this grim reality is to rock out even harder to show that the genre hasn't quite kicked the bucket yet. Thing is, if We Are Not Alone is any indication, not even a meth enema is going to start punk's heart back up.

Twenty years after his debut Let Love Rule, Lenny Kravitz gives us It is Time for a Love Revolution. He's still on message, baby. Love is your king--bow to the throne!

Kravitz is Hendrix filtered through a Prince-Mayfield distillery. The only time he severely missteps is when he dabbles with any genre approaching modernity. He's an anachronism who willingly makes all the mistakes of his influences from "hey, excess and debauchery feels really good," to "but Jesus is pretty neat too."

British electropop sensation Hot Chip's latest effort, Made In The Dark, is one of the catchiest things to come out this year. It houses head-bopping, base-heavy tracks that make you want to dance practically forever, then dies down into slower, calmer pieces. Kicking it all off is "Out At The Pictures," starting with a synthy, slowly accelerating build that soon breaks into a positively danceable, snare-filled groove-out. The vocals break in and eventually get to a repetitive chorus line that then goes back into the original groove.

Let's go straight to the facts, shall we? The Other Boleyn Girl is by no means meant to be a good movie. It's meant to be, to put it bluntly, historical trash. It's a lot of speculation and furthering of legend that ends up being soap opera and bitch-slapping in laced-up bodices that are meant to be ripped (in soft focus). There are supposed to bad dialogue, bad accents and hilarious enunciations. Basically, the raison d'être of the historical trash film is that it is meant to be so over-the-top bad, it loops back to good again.

When the history books reflect upon this era of filmmaking, Jason Statham will be hailed as one of its greatest action stars. Statham gained notoriety across the pond for his roles in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, then followed up with the starring role in Corey Yuen's over-the-top The Transporter. Statham gained a cult following among action fans for making a certain kind of movie--mindless, over-the-top action.

One of the longest, most-expensive labour disputes in industry history officially ended Tue., Feb. 26 as a staggering 93.6 per cent of the Writers Guild of America voted in favour of a new contract that will see them hard at work until 2011. Even though the writers have now returned to work, many are wondering what the resolution of the strike really means.

Since Hollywood has been churning out feature films for the better part of the last century, there's bound to be some stories told that are mightily similar. Luckily, hard-working writers have found ways to keep seemingly well-trodden stories fresh by changing the characters' genders, social standing or by placing the story in a wacky time period or country. The works of William Shakespeare, for instance, have been told over and over again, relying on fresh spins to keep audiences enthralled.

Lies, money, deceit, and death--it's the perfect, albeit predictable, formula for a murder mystery. But it's not necessarily the tale that stands out, it's the way that the story is told. Based on the story of English serial killer George Joseph Smith, The Drowning Girls is the fifth and final offering in the Alberta Theatre Projects' playRites Festival. The play's unembellished and simple approach allows the actors to take centre stage on this theatrical journey, laying bare the dark and twisted side of love.

More than anything, people are afraid of something different. Despite all the trappings of political correctness, there are too many people who find mocking the disabled--people with Down Syndrome or autism--comedy gold. Looking at the autistic spectrum through pop culture's lens, autistic kids are excessive geniuses or completely isolated social misfits. Society has de-valued them as people, thinking most of them idiot man-children who need to be helped along in everything they do.

An American covert war is being waged in the Middle East. Foreign correspondent Reese Erlich is working to expose it.

His new book, The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, deals with the tangled web of allies, spies and propaganda that stems from the American search of support for bombing Iran.

Erlich explained that America has justified its desire to bomb Iran since Sep. of last year stating Iran has nuclear weapons.