Screen
Corruption of small-town innocence
They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...
Restless leg syndrome
Feel free to call director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film (and potentially last, if you believe his retirement threats) a wacky mallard because it is one odd duck. If a Hitchcock movie took a Dateline NBC segment behind the art house theater and got it pregnant, ...
Reasonably entertaining diversion
Oh my God, they’ve shot Dame Helen Mirren! Realizing the Oscar-winning actress is playing a part, and not herself, the thought nonetheless is inescapable when Mirren’s ex-CIA agent takes a bullet in RED. I mean: How dare they...
Divorce story
I have been here before,But when or how I cannot tell:I know the grass beyond the door,The sweet keen smell,The sighing sound, the lights...
A tale of two cities
One of the more fascinating aspects of the movies is their ability to reach across time and space and continue cinematic conversations started long ago. Moviegoers will be able to peek in on that conversation next week at The Boedecker Theater where both 1971’s The ...
I see clay people
Before Pixar flexed its artistic muscle (a muscle they could stand to exercise more frequently these days), the message in American animated films ranged from “always be true to yourself” to “always be true to yourself and also get heterosexually married...
Mama, have mercy
Horror films are often peppered with moments in which you wish your protagonists were just a little more bright or had planned things out a little better — “Don’t go into that basement” and “Don’t open that door.” Even the beloved Shining leaves moments of, “Damn it...
[Ir]replaceable you
If Jean-Luc Godard was correct when he surmised, “The history of cinema is the story of men filming women,” then the French auteur Olivier Assayas’s latest, Clouds of Sils Maria, adds the crucial word missing from that epigraph: young...
The endless rhythm of the night
Have you every wondered why memories from your high school and college years always seem the clearest? The fondest? Back in the day, music...
