Screen
‘Red Cliff’ a rare war movie invested in strategy
Red Cliff is the first Chinese-language film from John Woo in more than a decade, and reportedly the most expensive Chineselanguage movie ever made (though, once you see its Lord of the Rings-like immensity, that “reportedly” becomes “oh, totally”). It is two-and-...
Homeviewing: Refugee-pers Creepers
The most satisfying response to a horror movie scare is not a jump, a shriek or a recoil. It is a verbal “Nope!” It...
You can’t take it with you
Jack Tuller is terminal. It’s a brain tumor that’ll do it, one he’s had since the early 1990s. Back then, the doctors gave Jack...
Powerful pandemic picture
One of the most powerful — and frightening — film themes is global pandemics. Diseases already seem to spread without us fully understanding or being able to control them, and rapidly evolve to become resistant to our defenses. It's not much of a leap to see a very ...
Home is wherever I’m with you
I’ve just always been fascinated by what happens when you take a doodle and breathe life into it,” animation director Tim Johnson says, describing his career and passion. Ever since the birth of the flickering image, writers, directors, animators and viewers have ...
Chinese art attack
It’s impossible not to watch Ai Weiwei, dubbed by some as the “Chinese Andy Warhol,” tell his motherland to eff right on off without thinking one thing first and foremost: That dude has got some Buddha-sized stones. Although Ai may possess the street-art cred and pop...
Iron curtain hurtin’
With apologies to SNL’s Cecily Strong, during its first 40 minutes, Atomic Blonde is “the person you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with...
Boring vampire sex
The fourth film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness...
Myopic biopic
Biopics are lies. Oh, don’t get me wrong, all storytelling is fundamentally fibbing. But it seems somehow more disingenuous to airbrush actual human histories, to select which warts to ignore and which redemptive moments to exaggerate. Documentaries exist for a ...
The unspoken space between
When writer/director Jason Hall’s brother returned home from the 1990s conflict in the Middle East, he did so with his “arms and legs and...
