Screen
Dark side of ballet
Black Swan is a breathtaking, intense, horrifying and beautiful cinematic essay on obsession, maturity and the fine line between reality and fantasy, and it’s well worth seeing, regardless of whether you’re interested in ballet...
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...
Abridged and confusing
In a future where the government keeps a tight rein on the populace, the annual reminder of an earlier failed uprising is The Hunger Games, a televised battle to the death of teens chosen from each of 12 districts. When her young sister Prim (Willow Shields) is ...
Who watches ‘The Watch,’ man?
Seeing as how it has an extraterrestrial plot, let’s describe The Watch using an astronomical metaphor. Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade are like comedic planets that orbit a central, burning sun. And that sun is made entirely of penis jokes. ...
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...
Suparental sympathies
Over the years, The Incredibles has, somewhat cloyingly, become the thinking person’s answer to “best superhero movie.” Writer/director Brad Bird’s original, stylishly sly Fantastic...
Reel to Reel | Week of March 22, 2012
21 JUMP STREET Two young police officers and ex-classmates go undercover at a local high school to investigate a dangerous drug ring. Rated R. At Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. — Los Angeles Times/MCT ACT OF VALOR After the rescue of a kidnapped CIA ...
What happens when a son sets out to profile his father?
The documentary film Old Man is as much a story of a troubled, perhaps marginally dysfunctional family as it is the story of a troubled record store — and, in many ways, a dysfunctional town. The portrait of Boulder is not graceful. It’s a critique of the town’s ...
Double Take: ‘Source Code’
When you die, the last eight minutes of your life remain electromagnetically imprinted in your brain. If we could inject someone into that persistent memory, they could solve crimes after the fact. It’s the fascinating premise for director Duncan Jones’ sci-fi ...
