Screen
The waiting is the hardest part
My grandmother once told me the greatest pain ever felt was felt by a parent burying her own child. Nothing could feel more unnatural....
I see you, 2016
OH man, 2016 has gotta feel so nervous, knowing its elder sibling, 2015, was so flinging-flanging good. Father Time has to be like, “No,...
Driven by fashion to mediocrity
Drive begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultra-violence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won’t be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks...
An international state of mind
We are living in a golden age of cinema. You might not agree if your focus is solely on multiplexes infected with sequilities and...
Son shines
Like death, taxes and CBS creating another spectacularly unfunny comedy, reboots are an inevitable part of life now. To resist them isn’t merely tilting at windmills, it’s tilting at windmills you then go ahead and buy anyway. Instead, let’s just get writer/director ...
Flood of clichés
Photographed with the same image acquisition technology James Cameron used on Avatar, the movie on which we can blame most of the cruddy 3-D films since, the new suspense thriller Sanctum, executive-produced by Cameron, presents images (underwater, generally) of ...
Brick-a-Bat
Forget “Don’t Tread on Me.” If Americans really wanted a flag that captures our collective mentality, it would be a morbidly obese snake with...
reel to reel | Week of Nov. 24, 2011
3 Hanna and Simon, a couple in their early 40s, live together in Berlin. With their 20th anniversary looming, they both become restless. At Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. — Denver Film Society Arthur Christmas Arthur Christmas is not a perfect gift, but it does ...
reel to reel | Week of July 19, 2012
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Peter Parker gets a new look (and an origin story) in this Marvel remake of everyone’s favorite web slinger. Unlike Toby Maguire’s emo-esque rendition of the wall-crawler, actor Andrew Garfield’s portayal hopes to bring Spidey back to his ...
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 ...
Falling down 12 steps
The ubiquitous hyperbolic after-school-special type of dramatization of the perils of alcoholism has lost its teeth; it no longer delivers a social bite so much as it gets drool everywhere. Thus, in many ways, what Smashed wanted to do is something necessary, as we ...
