Screen
Review: The Portal: A Cosmic Rock Odyssey
Billed as modern interpretation of a classic shamanic journey, The Portal: A Cosmic Rock Odyssey combines film, music and lighting to try and create a surreal, out-of-body, perhaps even religious experience for its audience. In the case of the audience at the Boulder...
Strength and decay: One strongman’s quest for the American dream
New Jersey strongman Stan “Stanless Steel” Pleskun, the “Strongest Man in the World at Bending Steel,” and his struggle to build a career performing feats of strength are the subject of New York filmmaker Zach Levy’s award-winning documentary Strongman, which will ...
Friendly skies ‘Up In The Air’
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) has a job that keeps him flying 200 days/ year in Up In The Air — he’s a corporate downsizer brought in to fire excess employees. It’s a tough job and Bingham has made a career out of detaching, disassociating from anything that could ...
Through a sparkling glass
Children’s movies are fascinating triumphs of simplicity and clarity. Often these movies render complex issues so succinctly that they become masterworks full of sophisticated...
A journey across French cinema
When François Truffaut
penned his revolutionary essay, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” the
up-and-coming critic laid waste to what he saw as a national tradition...
Noir on the range
Nowadays we call them noir, but back in the 1940s and ’50s they didn’t have a name. Born out of 1930s hard-boiled novels and...
reel to reel | Week of Oct. 27, 2011
50/50 Though it’s a cancer film, the tender and funny 50/50 addresses its subject with a refreshing lack of melodrama. Based on the true story of Will Reiser, a comedy writer, the movie follows Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who gets diagnosed with the C-word. ...
Inappropriate arachnid adjective
Ugh. Because there’s no way for me to do this that isn’t personal, I may as well go all out...
All is grace
General Lorens Löwenhielm (Jarl Kulle), a middle-aged man with a lifetime of missed opportunities behind him, has come to dinner. Seated next to his...

















