Screen
Bright Phoenix
The most laughable part of Her isn’t the complex, sophisticated romantic relationship between a man and his software operating system; it’s the high-waisted, Clint Eastwood-esque pants everybody wears. Forget flying cars; just promise us a future where we don’t have ...
Life without an operation manual
As the reality of summer blockbuster season sets in, a simple truth becomes all too clear: Moviegoing can be quite stressful. Death and destruction...
BW BIFF Picks 2013: ‘Trash Dance’
Texas choreographer Allison Orr does things the hard way. And as viewers of filmmaker Andrew Garrison’s Trash Dance will come to appreciate, the whole world is a better place because of her seeming lack of common sense...
Awful, not full of awe
Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires. It is a bloated juggernaut of stupidity, rolling its obese body stuffed with ...
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
Inappropriate arachnid adjective
Ugh. Because there’s no way for me to do this that isn’t personal, I may as well go all out...
A smooth crossover
Compared to so much American animation, which seems hell-bent on putting a global audience of addled kids in a paradoxical manic stupor, the work of Japan’s Studio Ghibli sets its own pace, establishes its own, meticulously observed realms of the fantastic and ...
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...
Food as culture, food as language
It would be low-hanging fruit to open this column with a declaration along the lines of: “The Flatirons Food Film Festival returns for a...
Ten short films about morality
Famed Polish writer/director Krzysztof Kieslowski already had a handful of feature films and documentaries under his belt when his writing partner, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, gave...
