Screen
They hung him on a cross
On Sept. 10, 1991, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves forever changing pop, punk, rap and rock while the cultural world embraced, assimilated and commoditized “Teen Spirit.” If record sales and critical acclaim have anything to say, then the message was clear...
From artist to activist
When Chinese government officials unexpectedly detained controversial artist Ai Weiwei — keeping him for 81 days in an undisclosed location — it ignited a firestorm of protests across the world that reinforced Ai’s calls for democracy in China...
Gestating the obvious
Writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is a dense, gorgeously made, challenging, total piece of shit. It is every bit the treatise on feminism and modern...
Big emotions in small packages
All the best movies elicit our emotions — Roger Ebert famously called these movies “empathy machines” — but there is a fine line between...
Children of the night
The fictional oil town of Bad City, Iran is, as far as we know, populated with pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, drug users, a stray family member or two, a cat and The Girl (Sheila Vand). Casting a menacing shadow over this ghost town, The Girl rides a skateboard, ...
You can’t take it with you
Jack Tuller is terminal. It’s a brain tumor that’ll do it, one he’s had since the early 1990s. Back then, the doctors gave Jack...
Sinful and sorrowful
The
Irishman begins in darkness. A small box of light at the center of
the frame opens like an iris, and we see nurses and doctors....
Hot dino-on-dino action
Hand a kid two dinosaur toys. Said kid will not use them to contemplate evolutionary biology. Said kid will smash the two of them together, simulating an epic dino-smackdown while emitting a likely annoying reptilian howl. Jurassic World is that but with a $150 ...
Cinema verboten
Between 1933 and 1945, Germany’s Third Reich produced 1,200 feature films, of which 300 were labeled propaganda by the Allies and banned from public screenings and distribution following the war. To this day, restrictions on 40 of these titles are still in place...
The beast within
The beauty of cinema is that nothing is what it seems. Images are not literal explanations, but visual descriptions of an emotional experience, and...
Mother is the first other
Rashaan Salaam and Kordell Stewart!” Sarah Adina Smith cheers with delight, recalling her high school years as a University of Colorado Boulder Buffs fan...
Just whose America is this?
July 12, 1917, Bisbee, Arizona: Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler and a deputized posse nearly 2,000 people strong rounded up 1,300 striking miners —...
