Screen
Holy Frenchman, Batman
There’s a moment in Holy Motors when Monsieur Merde, a dirty leprechaun-looking man in a tattered green suit with scraggly red hair, approaches the fringes of a high-fashion photo shoot. The photographer is grunting, “Beauty, beauty!” with perverse glee at his model...
BIFF’s new musical bent
As Boulder International Film Festival enters its ninth year, its founders, sisters Kathy and Robin Beeck, sit in a conference in their Pearl Street office, pondering the beast of an event they attempt to plan each year. They’re describing a new feature of this year’...
Prison break blast
Despite its advertising, The Next Three Days isn’t about convicted murderer Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks), but rather her obsessed husband John (Russell Crowe), who is convinced of her innocence and is willing to do anything — including breaking her out of jail — to...
Swimming in the Laika
From Ray Harryhausen’s Medusa to Henry Selick’s Jack Skellington, stopmotion animation is just frickin’ cool, yo. Maybe it’s the meticulous nature of the art form, with each tiny gesture by a character necessitating dozens of miniscule movements and hours of work ...
Sex will kill you
Director Jonathan Glazer and writer Walter Campbell’s Under the Skin joins the smallest movie subgenre: brilliant but batshit insane...
Continuing excellence
It’s that time of year again. The roads are packed, the lines at the sandwich shops quadruple, electrical outlets at Starbucks become a scarce commodity and Boulder is flooded with 30,000 hungry young minds ready to change the world. School is back in session, and so...
Can you see it now?
I bet the person in charge of marketing Colossal named the ulcer they developed “Nacho.” Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s latest is nigh-impossible to categorize and misleading...
An unpretentious timewaster
Ten percent to the usual charities?” I love a line like that, smack in the middle of a scene featuring bank robbers dividing up the spoils. It proves they’re good guys at heart, willing to spread it around (if only for the sake of appearances) while blowing the rest ...
‘Vampire’s Assitant’ doesn’t have enough bite
In the bizarre world of Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, there’s a war brewing over “portion” control. It seems the truce between those who sip, leaving humans a little weaker but none the wiser, and those who gorge, gluttons who leave death, destruction and...
Repo this film
Repo Men was awful. Graphic, bloody and with a staggering body count, this is all that’s wrong with Hollywood action films, a glossy sheen on a completely vapid, empty story that works against itself in scene after scene. Then, the worst of all is the surprise ...
The power of discussion
The “road trip” might be the ultimate American movie trope — the vast expanse of the continental United States providing a vivid backdrop while the confines of a vehicle pressure-cook characters in the comedy and drama they need to discover the intricacies of ...
















