Screen
Original sin
Every April, tiny flowers spread like confetti across the blackjack hills of Oklahoma. This is Osage Territory — land carved out and granted to...
How do you see the world?
A father is sick and the son is beckoned to his side. While the son waits for his father to die, he meets another wayward...
Twenty feet from stardom, a million miles from sanity
Like most love stories, this one begins at the movies. London, 1971: A young actor goes to see the latest release, A Clockwork Orange,...
Topple the patriarchy
Sex in cinema is a complex thing. Depicting something so private, yet so routine, with taste and titillation at the same time has been...
Step into the story
At last year’s Starz Denver Film Festival, I entered a theater playing the movie Grigris with no knowledge of what it was about, who made it, what country it came from or anything other than it was screening and I was free. Grigris — a joint production between Chad ...
The gospel according to woman
There is an old saying that you should never meet your heroes, they may disappoint you. The new Belgian comedy from writer/director Jaco Van...
You’re a good man, Charlie Brown
In the midst of cynically recycled nostalgia, bombastic franchises, reboots and sequels aplenty, it’s surprising that two of the best family movies to come out in 2015 were based on material first published in the 1950s. First was the wonderfully gentle and English, ...
A Hidden Life
Franz Jägerstätter’s arm would not rise. It couldn’t, not for Der Führer or any man, for that matter. His life belonged to the Lord....
We found love in a hopeless place
Hollywood must have a rooting interest in marriage. Why else would so many rom-coms revolve around weddings and meeting that perfect match? They must...
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...
Jedi mind tricks from ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’
"Is this really based on facts?” a fellow critic asked the studio rep at the screening of The Men Who Stare At Goats. “Does it matter?” I responded, and I was right, it doesn’t. Whether it’s factual or just a riff on the craziness of modern military and contemporary ...
Notes from the revolution
There’s reality, and then there’s everything else. Cinema exists firmly in the latter: Cameras don’t capture reality; they capture a perspective of it with...
