Screen
Are you awake?
The folks at Microsoft announced Alan Wake back in 2005, hyping how the game would change the face of gaming. Wish they let us know we would have to wait five years for the game, during which Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto IV and Modern Warfare have already changed ...
Images from the underground
Many filmmakers have strode the hallowed halls of the University of Colorado Boulder: Derek Cianfrance, Dalton Trumbo and Alex Cox are just a few,...
Fuzzy focus
Time has whittled mainstream memory of the original late 1960s/early 1970s Planet of the Apes franchise down to an image of Charlton Heston’s clenched fist and the Statue of Liberty tanning her torchy top half on the beach. However, the original series was actually ...
Forgettable
If you’ve ever seen an online profile picture, chances are you’re familiar with the pursed-lips, craned-neck, supposedly slimming contortion known affectionately as “the duckface.” Total Recall is the sci-fi tale of a quasi-postapocalyptic duckface war between Kate ...
Conned by a film
The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself. It’s billed as the first feature by the shadowy British ...
Vacant lots
Writer/director Sofia Coppola has made a movie that says nothing about people with nothing interesting to offer who steal from famous people who do nothing to be famous. And unless you’re a talk-show conspiracy theorist, it’s kind of hard to get too worked up about ...
‘How it feels to be black’
Rediscovering Gordon Parks with Criterion’s release of ‘The Learning Tree’
An era on screen
A crime drama about rival street gangs, a romance between two high schoolers, a history of shadow politics and a young man who feels...
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...
