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BIFF: Heads and horsetails
Penny Chenery, the owner of Secretariat, the Triple Crown-winning racehorse, reveals the truth behind her life in a new documentary, Penny & Red: The Life of Secretariat’s Owner...
‘A picture with a smile — and perhaps, a tear’
Like it or not, artists change. Though we wish to preserve them in amber, those we hold near and dear grow into individuals that...
Someone to watch over me
It all started with a movie, Lonesome, and the promotional team in charge of booking screenings of the 1928 romantic comedy in various mountain...
Bleak and white
Celebrated narcissist and Freddy Krueger look-a-like Frank Miller gives the women he writes a plethora of career choices. They can be prostitutes, strippers, bondage-wearing murderers or corpses. Some get to be all of those! Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is part ...
Majestical or just majestic?
Family units are fascinating things. Some come ready-made, while others must be forged out of sheer will. That’s what Ricky (Julian Dennison) is hoping...
Turning rebellion into money
What is it about messianic men and the chaos they cause? They are almost always false prophets, yet time and time again, we fall...
Rediscovered country
It opens like any other western: Sepia soaked still photographs of settlers in wagons traversing a wild frontier while title cards credit the actors, the...
Harry Potter grows up
Much as I like the Paranormal Activity pictures for their unfashionable minimalism and quaintly Victorian lack of gore, it’s nice to get back to something like The Woman in Black — not authentic Victoriana, exactly (Susan Hill’s novel was published in 1983), and ...
Who doesn’t want 15 minutes of fame?
Finders Keepers is as delightful as it is bizarre. It is the story of an amputated left foot and the two men who fought over it from 2008 to 2014. Some things you just have to see to believe...
Thank god for Mendes
Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated Rio, the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, “I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed.” This is the movie’s strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that’s almost ...
Submit to the scare tactics
Imagine you’ve checked into your hotel room, passing by signs at the hotel entrance about a boy gone missing and seen a distraught man handing out more copies of that same flyer. “How sad,” you think. And what a weekend to lose your child, when the town is overrun ...
