Screen
2012, will you marry me?
I want the 2012 year-in-film to have my babies. Heck, I’ll have its babies; it has been so durn good I’d totally go seahorse for it. Before I reduce a year that renewed my cinematic soul to a series of arbitrary numbers and rankings, a quick caveat: Because ...
Don’t escape – innovate
After a long, hard day at work, many people find themselves in front of a brightly lit screen, immersed in what they consider pure entertainment. To them, it’s a chance to let go, to forget about their troubles, to distract themselves from their boring existence on...
Crank it up
There are three perfect scenes in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. Not “good” scenes. Not “great” scenes. Three perfect scenes. Now, as a whole, The Scorch Trials is not a perfect movie. Nor is it a great one. But it is very good, and most of that has to do with ...
Class warfare wedding
So few ensemble-driven African- American films make it to market — whether with familiar faces or unknowns — that the ones that do get out of the gate provoke a weird degree of scrutiny regarding what they have to say about the black experience. Who needs the ...
Someone to watch over me
It all started with a movie, Lonesome, and the promotional team in charge of booking screenings of the 1928 romantic comedy in various mountain...
A magical tale through film history
Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a scruffy orphan who lives in forgotten spaces hidden in the walls of Gare Montparnasse, a bustling train station located in the center of Paris. It’s 1931 and memories of The Great War are fresh, even as everyone tries to resume their ...
Kaiju goo goo
Oscar-winning fish pornographer Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim was a just-fine endeavor hailed as near-sexually-satisfying by a vocal community blessed/cursed with low expectations. Pacific...
Xerox Xerxes
When director Zack Snyder’s opus of underwear modeling amidst geysers of animated blood, 300, first arrived eight years ago, no one expected a sequel. And not just because 299 of the 300 Spartans were way too dead to return. Technically, 300: Rise of an Empire isn’t ...
