Screen
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...
Iron curtain hurtin’
With apologies to SNL’s Cecily Strong, during its first 40 minutes, Atomic Blonde is “the person you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with...
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, ...
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 —...
‘It Comes at Night’ is awful good
Everything about It Comes at Night is frickin’ uncomfortable. From the unfathomable interpersonal horror at the film’s center to the way everyone is all...
An ache to make something impactful
According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, more than 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017. The primary offender: opioids — heroin,...
Cinema of the sacred
There once was a time when some of the brightest thinkers wondered if movies were the answer. Could this new visual language topple tyrants?...
‘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...
BIFF: God Loves Uganda
The documentary God Loves Uganda begins innocently enough, outlining evangelical outreach efforts by the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer (yes, they refer to it as IHOP) to Uganda...
An indecisive mash-up
I take notes as I watch films so that I can remember salient plot points, great effects, and idiotic story twists. During The Other Guys, I wrote down “buddy cop film from hell.” That might well sum up the weird mash-up that is The Other Guys, a movie that can’t ...
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...
