Screen
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...
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 ...
An open letter to CU students: Celebrate Stan
Dear University of Colorado students:
If I could offer you one word of advice — no, it’s not sunscreen — it would be this: Resources....
I see clay people
Before Pixar flexed its artistic muscle (a muscle they could stand to exercise more frequently these days), the message in American animated films ranged from “always be true to yourself” to “always be true to yourself and also get heterosexually married...
Mamma Roma
Few filmmakers are as divisive as the great Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was a novelist, a poet and a provocateur even before he...
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 ...
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-...
‘Zombie’ hilarity
It takes a certain sense of humor to enjoy a horror comedy film like Zombieland, but if you can laugh at graphic violence and can see the humor in parody, then this is a great movie for you to catch. Full of brilliantly funny lines, Zombieland offers a zombie film ...
Make way for yesterday
The movies started small. So small that only one person at a time could watch them. The year was 1892, and Thomas Edison and his colleague William Kennedy Laurie Dickson discovered that if you spun sequential photographs in a small box, you could create the illusion ...
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...
Best in show
If it’s not a labor of love, then it’s a labor of something,” Errol Morris said, drawing a laugh from the Friday morning audience....


















