Screen
Black humorless
Low-brow. Just expect it from Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver ( Jack Black) first arrives at the kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging fire by dropping his shorts and urinating, I was astonished by the audience laughter. This is a film unabashedly aimed at teen...
‘The Revenant’ punishes DiCaprio for Academy love
Without spoiling whether survivalist/tempting-bear-treat Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) survives The Revenant, we can still talk about one climactic shot. DiCaprio, having been maimed in...
Out of this world
Another Earth is quietly and movingly out of this world. Director Mike Cahill has woven sci-fi imaginings and quantum physics theories of parallel universes into a provocative meditation on the prospect of rewriting your life history. It is no simple task to ...
Suburbs are hell
Things I was unprepared for in George Clooney’s Suburbicon, based on the trailers: (1) Fatt Damon spanking Julianne Moore (doing a weird Marilyn Monroe...
Good old-fashioned art cinema
His name is Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli), and he calls no nation home. He’s a sailor by trade — the kind mothers warn their...
Control-Z Cruise
Every time Tom Cruise, the greatest modern matinee idol, makes a new movie, everybody rushes to fuse artist and art and spews out some variation of “I just don’t like him anymore.” America’s collective moral stance seems to be that we should never forget that someone...
Happy little trees
With a tightly wound blond perm, a smoker’s pipe and a voice that registers just north of a whisper, Carl Nargle is one of...
A tale of dirty, stinking apes
What if there was a research drug in the laboratory right now that had a good chance of curing Alzheimer’s but needed more testing on animals before it could be released for human trials? And what if that same drug made its research subjects smarter? That’s the ...
Capturing that local flavor
You can take the man out of the Mission, but you can’t take the Mission out of the man,” one of lead-character Che’s (Benjamin Bratt) homeboys in La Mission says during a low-rider jaunt through the North Beach district of San Francisco after Che expresses ...
Welcome back
The Boulder International Film Festival is a local cinematic staple. And in 2020, BIFF was one of the last in-person events held before the...
