Screen
British invasion in ‘Pirate Radio’
Any film that’s built around the music of the mid-1960s starts out with one thing going for it: a great soundtrack. That Pirate Radio goes beyond that and offers up an entertaining and poignant story about loss of innocence is what makes it a film well worth your ...
Streaming cat blues
The bad news: the novel
coronavirus has disrupted life as we know it, and will for the next couple
months. But, you’ve gone to the store,...
Death of the handmade
Clothes make the man. But who makes the clothes? Nowadays, most of us walk around wearing cookie-cutter shirts, pants and jackets, all produced en masse and for no one in particular. Sure, they come in a variety of standardized sizes, but very few bodies are standard...
‘Edge of Darkness’ is boring
Mel Gibson has made a lot of films where he’s the simple-minded tough guy, notably the Lethal Weapon series, but the last few years have seen his personal life overshadow his career as he careened from one gaffe to the next. Edge of Darkness represents him trying to ...
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 ...
You’re gonna go far, kid
Two years ago, Missy Franklin — a swimmer from Centennial, Colo. – caught the attention of the Olympic world. The freshfaced phenom became the first female to qualify for seven Olympic events and ended up collecting one bronze and four gold medals, and setting two ...
Fuzzy focus
Time has whittled mainstream memory of the original late 1960s/early 1970s Planet of the Apes franchise down to an image of Charlton Heston’s clenched fist and the Statue of Liberty tanning her torchy top half on the beach. However, the original series was actually ...
Stuck in a bunker with you?
You can keep your Jason Voorhies and Freddy Kreuger. To me, nothing is more terrifying than an overweight, middle-aged, gun-loving, white man obsessed with...
Don’t escape – innovate
After a long, hard day at work, many people find themselves in front of a brightly lit screen, immersed in what they consider pure entertainment. To them, it’s a chance to let go, to forget about their troubles, to distract themselves from their boring existence on...
Slow-mo Poirot
Whether you find the latest adaptation of the Agatha Christie classic, Murder on the Orient Express, “deliberate” or “boring” hinges entirely on the delight...
Scorsese comes up short with ‘Shutter Island’
Dennis Lehane's character-packed but gimmicky novel "Shutter Island" earns a slightly less gimmicky film from Martin Scorsese, who makes this 1950s period piece his tribute to the psychological thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock...
The only living boy in Boo York
Disney has a record of racial sensitivity rivaled only by emails from loathed uncles with subject lines that start “FW: FW: FW: RE: Obama.”...