Screen
‘Bright Star’ pretty, but lacking substance
Certain images in Jane Campion's Bright Star are beautiful, as opposed to merely attractive, and only a major talent could've produced them. My favorite is a sundrenched shot of Abbie Cornish's Fanny Brawne, her head and heart newly opened to the intoxication of love...
A pretty smart idiot
Floating through life on a personal high only partly provided by cannabis, the bearded, Crocs-sporting, semiprofessional farmer specializing in organics (or rather, “biodynamics”) is played, winningly, by Paul Rudd in an enjoyable shamble of a picture called Our ...
John Hughes for kids
Released a year ago, the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie captured remarkably little of the sly charm of the Jeff Kinney books that line my son’s bookshelf. The film did, however, capture enough of the fan base to warrant a sequel. And here we are. And it’s a little ...
The tin shine of BIFF
As the Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) celebrates its 10th anniversary, founders Kathy and Robin Beeck have much to celebrate...
Cage shines as corrupt New Orleans cop
"Anything’s possible in this storm!” says the man with the badge in Werner Herzog’s delirious Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year. It’s a very loose remake of 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, in which ...
Speedy and irritable
The most important thing to know before attempting to endure the lumbering bore that is Need for Speed is this: every single character in the film is unspeakably dumb. Presumably set in a world where humans never mentally evolved from an animal state, the movie ...
Emancipation examination
A humble suggestion: Force the chittering, self-serving partisans in Washington who increasingly prefer filibusters over floor votes to watch Lincoln. Director Steven Spielberg’s latest provides a character sketch, not of its titular president, but of America’s ...
Wes Anderson could go full Burton
It’s not writer/director Wes Anderson’s fault that since he burst on the scene with what is still his best film, Bottle Rocket, he has become a hipster demigod...
Mutant fight club
Those who only know comic books through their (somehow) still-increasingly popular cinematic adaptations don’t know the dirty secret about the source material: Most story...
Cuteness gets old
If the French-made, globally minded study in adorableness known as Babies keeps a few Westernized parents from over-scheduling, micromanaging, helicoptering and snowplowing their way through their neurotic kids’ existence, then I say give director Thomas Balmes the...
Fender blender
Everybody needs a little help. Writer/director/actor Dax Shepard could have probably used another writer, a third director (David Palmer already co-directed) and a better group of actors for Hit and Run, a movie that is a cinematic traffic accident with multiple ...


















