Screen
A true auteur
When the French writers for Cahiers du cinema coined the term “auteur” in the late ’50s, they envisioned an author of motion pictures —...
Casualties of war
What does it take to be a soldier on the Casualty Notification Team, the “Angels of Death Squadron,” traveling the United States and letting spouses and parents know that someone has died while in the Army? And at what cost personally...
I really don’t cartel do u?
If Fox News made Ambien, the opening sequence of Sicario: Day of the Soldado would be its signature hallucinatory nightmare. A classic “You got...
In this life or the next
Filmmaking is an act of optimism. Setting ideas to paper, convincing others to come and join the party, devoting time, money, blood, sweat and tears to capture those images on celluloid, believing those images can carry meaning throughout the world and, hopefully, ...
The original crazy drummer
Rock stars don’t always have the prettiest personal lives. John Lennon (pre-Yoko) intimidated and threatened the women in his life. Sid Vicious may or may not have killed Nancy Spungen. Buddy Rich allegedly verbally abused every member of his band, making scores of...
Dwarfing expectations
We are masters of cynicism, proudly sporting a black belt in backlash. If this generation of critics, pseudo-critics and armchair-article-writing audience members given the bully pulpit of social media has any legacy, it will be bitching for bitching’s sake...
The poetry of cinema
Though an obscure class or two on film studies or screenwriting sometimes appears on the course list at Naropa University, the Buddhist-inspired Boulder school has no film studies major. However, since 1999, Naropa has enjoyed the presence of the novelist, singer-...
‘Fish Tank’ has same strains of ‘Precious’
LOS ANGELES — Mia is 15, all elbows and anger, going at her life in a rundown apartment complex in Essex as if it were one long skirmish in British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's exceptionally well-crafted drama, "Fish Tank...
For now we see through a glass, darkly
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became...
Men ruin everything
I don’t want to review Mad Max: Fury Road. I want to write love letters to it or draw it like one of those French girls. If I could find the right keystroke combination, this review would just be one long onomatopoetic recreation of the feral roar of approval ...
A snapshot, somewhat blurry, of ‘New York’
The simplest thing you can say about the movies is that they take you places, geographically, emotionally, hypnotically, and the ongoing “Cities We Love” project that began three years ago with Paris, je t’aime continues its global exploration with New York, I Love ...
