Screen
Heaven is overrated
Recently, I joylessly trudged through the first season of Amazon’s Transparent, a show populated with so many soulless, vacuous, obnoxious characters that I began rooting for them to die horrifically. This follows my quasi-traumatic enduring of Breaking Bad, an over-...
Don’t let millennials time travel
Project Almanac understands what people really want in a time-travel movie: long stretches of people soldering circuit boards and buying batteries. I mean, why waste time pondering temporal paradoxes when audiences just want to sit back and marvel at the thrill of ...
IFS packs its schedule with female directors and its first 3D...
The International Film Series provides a little something for everyone — from unknown art house flicks to ’70s blockbusters. If there’s one word to describe each season, says IFS director Pablo Kjolseth, it’s eclectic...
The sound of a true American voice
Ten years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, a new voice in American cinema was announced. The voice was not loud, but it was clear, and it belonged to the 29-year-old Ramin Bahrani...
The long on the shorts
As Violet from Willy Wonka or someone who just saw a spider will tell you, bigger isn’t necessarily better. An afterthought for most normals until Oscar night, short films are often bite-sized bits of delightful wonder. Heck, sometimes they even grow up to be feature...
Photographing philosophy
Would you like to see my girlfriend?” Nicholas Vreeland asks. Considering that Vreeland has been a chaste Buddhist monk for the past 28 years, you can bet that this “girlfriend” is not of the typical kind. Indeed, it is not. Vreeland’s girlfriend is a camera...
Confusing hacktion
Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? Is The Daily Show a news program with some comedy in it or a comedy program with some news in it? Is Blackhat a bad movie with a lot of good parts or a good movie with a lot of bad parts? The world may ...
When the good comes undone
Set in a small coal-mining town in the hills of West Virginia, Little Accidents revolves around two incidents, neither of which is little. The first provides the engine of the plot: an accidental death that is covered up. The second: gross negligence that cost 10 ...
