Screen
Upcoming IFS season promises collaborations and festival favorites
The International Film Series, which kicks off today, is an outlet for experimentation, and this season IFS Director Pablo Kjolseth created a program full of original ideas...
Sensationalism, not drama
One of the great mysteries of filmgoing relates to a question the medium has posed since its infancy: When is “too much” just right...
Meta-references are not always good
In the first few minutes of Scream 4, the teenage girls home by themselves on a dark night are watching a DVD and discussing the merits and demerits of the Saw franchise, which one of the girls refers to as “torture porn,” and then brrrrrrrrrrrrp brrrrrrrrrrrrp goes ...
He’s not a bad guy; he’s just a little clingy
Life’s pretty good for Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman). It’s been six years since the two unmasked the...
The sickness unto death
What is there left to say about Woody Allen, the 79-year-old writer/ director of 45 feature films, a dozen of them masterpieces? Better yet, what does Woody Allen have left to say? Averaging a little more than a movie a year since his inauspicious debut in 1966 (What...
Reel to reel | Week of October 10, 2013
Blue Jasmine After everything in her life falls to pieces, elegant New York socialite Jasmine moves into her sister Ginger’s modest apartment in San Francisco to try to pull herself back together again. Rated PG. At Boedecker, Esquire, Colony Square. Captain ...
Making a game of it
Most graphic novel-based films shed the visual style of the original work, though a few have tried to present a hybrid view, notably Sin City and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the first to offer up a unique hybrid where the action, ...
One for the fan boys
Primarily for dues-paying “X-Men” club members in good standing, rather than anyone wandering by a multiplex wondering if the prequel stands on its own, X-Men: First Class settles for moderately engrossing second-class mutant super-heroism. Plus it includes January...
Destination unknown
When Ivan Locke left work, he had a family, a wife, a home, a job and a claim in one of Europe’s future skyscrapers. By the time he reaches his destination, he will have lost it all. To borrow Tolstoy’s opening line from Anna Karenina, “Happy commuters are all alike...
Extra, extra bad things
So I’m talking to a friend the other day, and he says “I don’t see why we need the news anymore if we have social media.” The minute I stopped beating him senseless whilst vomiting due to the sulfuric smell of stupidity, I pointed out that Twitter has yet to take ...


















