Screen
Running with it
A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise. It’s pungent and quick on its feet, capturing the clubs, the shag-heavy interiors and the Farrahhaired...
Surreally ambitious
The year’s best films thus far — writer/director Ari Aster’s Hereditary and writer/director Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You — have two major similarities:...
Out of the frying pan
All stories have to begin somewhere. Brimstone & Glory, the new documentary about Mexico’s weeklong National Pyrotechnics Festival, takes place in modern-day Tultepec, but...
Salute your shorts
It’s Oscar season at the movies and that means celebrating the cinematic high-water marks that 2016 brought. And with 62 nominated films to choose...
The birth of the last lion
May 1940: Hitler is riding roughshod across Europe, gobbling up territory like an insatiable monster. Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Denmark have all fallen. Belgium,...
Earth, wind and fire
Most movies, on some level, are about reconciling the space between parents and their children. It’s the theme that runs right through the heart...
reel to reel | Week of May 17, 2012
4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH In a large apartment high above the city lives a couple. They’re in love. She’s a painter, he’s a successful actor. Just a normal afternoon — except that this isn’t a normal afternoon, for them or anyone else. Because tomorrow, at 4:44 a.m., ...
Ron Burgundy is evil
Arrogant, stupid, sexist, racist, cowardly, delusional, talentless and vile: Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is the villain of both Anchorman and its sequel, Anchorman 2, and nobody seems to remember that. Don’t believe it? He is a newsman who single-handedly kills the ...
Comedy, with flashes of Hughes
The ghost of John Hughes smiles upon Easy A, a film that freely and giddily borrows from and pays tribute to Hughes’ famous Holy Trinity of ’80s teen angst comedies...
reel to reel | Week of Feb 23, 2012
ACT OF VALOR After the rescue of a kidnapped CIA operative leads to the discovery of a terrorist plot against the U.S., a team of Navy Seals is dispatched on a worldwide manhunt to foil the attack. At Century. Colony Square, Twin Peaks. — Los Angeles Times/MCT ...
