Screen
How to make friends
A cross far too many stretches of our movie-going lives, we see movie after movie without seeing one that really moves. At once stealthy and breathlessly paced, The Social Network scoots at a fabulous clip, depicting how its version of Facebook founder Mark ...
Learning the wrong lessons
An employee of the Chicago public school system, ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth, portrayed by Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver and...
Death or psychosis
You have to let go of the living,” says the funeral director played by Liam Neeson to Anna, the dead schoolteacher in the red slip, played by Christina Ricci, in the new thriller After.Life. He sounds like the stage manager in a particularly grim production of Our ...
reel to reel | Week of Dec. 29, 2011
The Adventures of Tintin See full review Page 39. Rated PG. At Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked The chipmunks’ third digitally animated turn on the big screen parks the guys, their three Chipette counterparts and their ...
God’s lonely men
For most, Taxi Driver is summed up by one of the most famous lines in cinema: “You talking to me?” Conveying masculinity and bravado, it readies angry men for battle. But it is misleading. It is an act, a façade. The truth is found in the line that follows: “Well, I’...
Swimming in the Laika
From Ray Harryhausen’s Medusa to Henry Selick’s Jack Skellington, stopmotion animation is just frickin’ cool, yo. Maybe it’s the meticulous nature of the art form, with each tiny gesture by a character necessitating dozens of miniscule movements and hours of work ...
A patient Western
At one point in Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while ...
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...
Come and see
Two Decembers ago, New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote, “The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies.” True in 2013, and true in 2015 as cinema continues an upward ...
