Screen
Sodium eyewater
You know those feel-good documentaries that make your heart swell as you discover some unknown artist, overlooked genius or divine but unrecognized human accomplishment? The Salt of the Earth is not one of those. For about 95 of its 110 minutes, directors Wim Wenders...
Thank god for Mendes
Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated Rio, the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, “I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed.” This is the movie’s strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that’s almost ...
Your lowness
What do you get when you combine an atrocious script with big-budget production and a bevy of top actors? Your Highness, one of the worst films I have had to sit through in a long time. To think that it featured Natalie Portman, James Franco and Zooey Deschanel ...
Lean, mean empathy machine
Smarter, better people than me have written about Moonlight, writer/director Barry Jenkins’ megaton bomb of artistic triumph. Honestly, I almost didn’t write this at...
Local Theater Company’s ‘Discount Ghost Stories: Colorado’
Whether they’re tossed aside carelessly or discarded maliciously, some pieces of history just get lost.
Like the story of Florence Molloy and Mabel MacLeay, who...
Compulsive viewing
Let’s get this out of the way: If you’ve ever been in a car crash, The Road Movie is not for you. Much in...
Awful, not full of awe
Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires. It is a bloated juggernaut of stupidity, rolling its obese body stuffed with ...
We are family
If necessity is the mother of invention, then Inez de la Paz needs to invent a new life for herself and her little boy....
Iron performance
On the surface, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might not seem like a good subject for a biopic. She wasn’t flamboyant, there’s no romantic back-story, and she was more known for her steel will than her diplomacy. In these politically charged times, ...
Missed payoff
Maybe in a few years, the high-flying machinations of notorious Washington puppet-master Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, his partner in crime, will be funny. But even with Kevin Spacey trying his carnival barker hardest in Casino Jack, it still feels too painfully...