Screen
Game theory
We’re only a couple months into the new year, but The Last of Us looks destined to be one of the most talked-about shows...
‘Somebody’s fool’
Orson Welles needed money. That’s how this story begins. Back in 1946, Welles was putting the finishing touches on an ambitious stage production of...
Daguerreotypes
For 50 years, Agnès Varda lived on Paris’ Rue Daguerre, a quiet street of merchants not far from Montparnasse. She saw the men and...
‘Astro Boy’ seems dated
Lovely dollops of wit and warmth float through the big screen version of Astro Boy, the latest Japanese TV cartoon to make it to the big screen. But the look, themes and slam-bang "Transformers" violence of that 1960s animated series make this every bit as dated as "...
Through a sparkling glass
Children’s movies are fascinating triumphs of simplicity and clarity. Often these movies render complex issues so succinctly that they become masterworks full of sophisticated...
Brakhage Center Symposium to honor George Kuchar
To borrow a line from French filmmaker and critic, Jean-Luc Godard, “Cinema is everywhere.” And from March 4-6, cinema is indeed everywhere in Boulder....
Teen dream, parental nightmare
Project X is the movie equivalent of that good-looking, well-off teenage boy your gut tells you to keep away from your teenage daughter. Something sets off the warning bells — that he has lost his mind to his hormones, that he objectifies women in the worst way, ...
‘The Wolverine:’ Better Orient-ed
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the kind of movie that is released with apologies and finger-pointing. After his first solo stint landed with the grace and majesty of a wet fart, odds were stacked against a sequel for Wolvie. But if Hugh Jackman can forcibly warble Les ...
A woman’s work and a son’s obsession
There’s a bit of fairy
tale when it comes to Benedetta Barzini. As the story goes, it was 1963 when
Barzini was discovered on the streets...
You say you want a revolution?
The “99 percent vs. the 1 percent” analogy at work in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has all the subtlety of a funeral selfie. But it is precisely this lack of sophistication in message that may make this the most zeitgeist-capturing, intellectually resonant sci-fi ...
In this theater I call my soul
My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else. —Martin Scorsese
It all goes back to Mean Streets: “You don’t make up...
Sexually transmitted ignorance
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is an alarmingly well-reviewed throwback horror movie that follows Jay Height (Maika Monroe), whose vagina gets cursed by Satan after she does it with her boyfriend. He straps her to a chair and explains she’s got ...