Screen
Dark side of ballet
Black Swan is a breathtaking, intense, horrifying and beautiful cinematic essay on obsession, maturity and the fine line between reality and fantasy, and it’s well worth seeing, regardless of whether you’re interested in ballet...
The problem with pulling your punches
When Wonder Woman sailed into theaters this summer, coolly breaking superhero box office record after box office record, it was no surprise that curious...
Two bloated egos harmonize in ‘Elvis & Nixon’
There is an often-repeated anecdote that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and came in second. It’s a popular story, one...
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 ...
Nothing left to lose
It was one of those moments. The kind where two historical figures crossed paths briefly and a simple exchange carries meaning greater than one...
Not awful, at least
Compared to 27 Dresses, The Ugly Truth and Killers — The Ugly Truth and Killers being extra-specially evil benchmarks of how low modern romantic comedies can go — Life as We Know It does not crush your soul, does not turn Katherine Heigl into a shrill pain in the ...
Daguerreotypes
For 50 years, Agnès Varda lived on Paris’ Rue Daguerre, a quiet street of merchants not far from Montparnasse. She saw the men and...
Magic needed
I really liked Fantasia (1940) as a kid and recall being amazed at how well the music and animation synchronized in one of the most trippy of the Disney animated films. The centerpiece of Fantasia was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene, where Mickey Mouse used magic ...
A holistic struggle
Colorado rancher Kirk Hanna was the ideal cowboy: tall, dark and handsome, complete with a Tom Selleck mustache and a white Stetson hat. But Hanna was much more than your average cowboy. He was a progressive concerned with ecology and conservation, and to practice ...
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story
Alexander Hamilton was a thinker, a writer, a dreamer, a mind constantly at work. Born out of wedlock and orphaned on a Caribbean island,...
