Screen
Make way for yesterday
The movies started small. So small that only one person at a time could watch them. The year was 1892, and Thomas Edison and his colleague William Kennedy Laurie Dickson discovered that if you spun sequential photographs in a small box, you could create the illusion ...
Talking twinkies
The Lego Movie being somehow good ruined our ability to completely dismiss a film’s concept upon first hearing it. Who knows, maybe Minions would be infused with the same cleverness, the same all-ages wonder and fun? In the first 10 minutes, a pillshaped living ...
Bloody interesting
Early on in the derivative but fairly absorbing blur titled Safe House, set in Cape Town, South Africa, Denzel Washington’s Tobin Frost, a spy in from the cold, is brought to a Central Intelligence Agency safe house so that he can be asked a few questions about the ...
Whirl fools
Imagine watching Star Wars and deciding the franchise should forever forward follow C-3PO. And that C-3PO was played by a former hunk who now...
‘Life in plastic’
Storytelling is creativity within limitations. And when your story takes place in a fantasy world — be it with dragons, lightsabers or toys —...
All’s well that ends well
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is a rare gift. Long-running film franchises generally either fade away or leave fans hanging. Director David Yates takes advantage of the opportunity to close the book on this series by creating a film finale that ...
Next-best thing
Operatic characters are larger than life. Especially when projected on a 20-foot tall movie screen...
reel to reel | Week of Dec. 1, 2011
Arthur Christmas Arthur Christmas is not a perfect gift, but it does feature enough holiday cheer and silly fun to make it more entertaining than 10 lords a-leaping. It helps that the film has a warm message about how tradition should never be sacrificed for ...
Freaky Frequency
For a movie reviewer, having a favorite genre kinda feels like a parent having a favorite child; oh, they totally do, they’re just not supposed to talk about it. Well, just like your mom told your sister when you were out of earshot, if all other genres were out of ...
Bold thinking at the BolderLife Festival
Often we are so bombarded with media and messaging that it can become easy to distance ourselves from the harsh realities of the world. At precisely the time our civilization should be taking a hard look into what makes us a communal society, we are retreating en ...
Geneticists and horror
Equal parts Species and The Savage is Loose, the eccentric and crafty new thriller Splice isn’t for audiences who require strong, noble rooting interests in their questing protagonists of science. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, neither of whom make it a habit to ...

















