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...
Women, poorly portrayed
Thwarted by the same awkward timing that zonked Confessions of a Shopaholic two years ago, just when shopaholics began to seem extra-heinous, the film version of I Don’t Know How She Does It doesn’t know how to do what I think it’s trying to do...
We all go a little mad sometimes
Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) is precisely the type of writer you’d expect to meet if you’d read one of her stories: Distant, acerbic and...
reel to reel | Week of Feb 2, 2012
Addiction Inc In the 1980s, Victor DeNoble was a research scientist at a major tobacco company, where he was given the task of finding a substitute for nicotine that would not cause heart attacks. He succeeded, but in the process he proved something that the ...
When the system wins
It doesn’t take long for Alex Cox, University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor and director of such cult classics as Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and The Highway Patrolman (which screens at the International Film Series on Wednesday, Oct. 5), to show his ...
Coming of age
Since his 1991 debut, Slacker, writer/director Richard Linklater has quietly become the most reflective director in American cinema. In the documentary Double Play: Jack Benning and Richard Linklater (Gabe Klinger 2013), currently available via Video on Demand, he ...
Corruption of small-town innocence
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...
To see a man about a demon
Offering moderately scary Roman Catholic “gotchas!” to a global film audience of all creeds, The Rite comes from director Mikael Hafstrom, whose previous film was the stylish supernatural thriller 1408...
The core of Apple’s man
Apparently, writer Aaron Sorkin has decided that his “thing” is making fascinating films out of seemingly unfilmable, boring-ass ideas. I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t like Apple. I don’t like Steve Jobs. I don’t care about Steve Jobs. I didn’t care to ever see a ...
