Lake Bell can do incredible things with her tongue. She can touch her nose, twist it to both sides, and fold it backward as flat as an omelet. In a studio in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, recording vocal exercise warmups for an online campaign promoting her directorial debut, In a…
Like so many screenplays, The World’s End has its origins in a Starbucks. As director Edgar Wright tells it, the ideas for next week’s sci-fi action-comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost came to him while shooting the trio’s last film, the buddy-cop parody Hot Fuzz. That film takes place…
The final eight episodes of Breaking Bad will begin Sunday. Over the course of five seasons, the series has established itself not just as one of the best shows now on TV, but as one of the best ever — maybe the best ever. On the eve of this final…
For ten years, The Room has been confounding and entertaining audiences. The film’s strange blend of inept performance, oblique writing and haphazard direction has earned it an ever-growing cult audience that can’t get enough of the movie’s unique charms. Sure, by most standards it a “bad” film, even a terrible…
As part of a collaborative group of filmmakers working hard under the name No Coast Artists, Andrew Schneider sees the world of cinema as a place where movies are art made by and for everyone. When the Fort Collins-based group set out to create its first major film production, Whensday,…
Welcome to a new column called Geek Speak, in which we take on an aspect of geek culture each week. There is nothing quite like The Room. It’s one of a handful of movies considered “the worst movie ever” that has somehow managed to find an enduring audience. For those…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
There are twists aplenty but few surprises in Wasteland, a warmhearted but routine heist drama from first-time writer-director Rowan Athale. After serving time for crimes he didn’t commit, 22-year-old Harvey (Luke Treadaway, terrific) returns to his Yorkshire, England, home town intent on revenge against Roper (Neil Maskell), the neighborhood drug…
When David Gordon Green introduced Paul Rudd to Emile Hirsch, the two actors didn’t click. It was an awkward seafood dinner. “Emile just started talking about something — girls, maybe — and I was doing a piss-poor job of trying to follow along,” recalls Rudd. “And when Emile got up…
Movie stars shouldn’t be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday’s youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That’s not to say actors can’t age gracefully, or that…
If there’s one nuance mainstream comedies have yet to learn, it’s that “empathetic” need not mean “likable” — audiences can feel for characters they don’t necessarily want to be. The hit black comedy Horrible Bosses, which had three angry underlings plotting murderous vengeance against their you-know-whats, should have been a…
The Western is dead. For years, even decades, the Western genre has been a wasteland, with few new films coming out and even fewer hits. Luckily, horror fans know what to do with dead things: make them undead, so they can stand up again and start biting faces and murdering…
In a string of films in the 1970s, Robert Altman placed his alternative spin on everything from crime movies (Thieves Like Us, 1974) to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (The Long Goodbye, 1973). But Altman’s self-proclaimed anti-Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which followed popular comedy M*A*S*H in 1971, might just be…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
All that Canadian farmer Craig Morrison (James Cromwell), age 87, wants to do is build a little house, on his own land, without having to ask anyone’s permission. In the pitch-perfect, deeply affecting Still Mine, writer-director Michael McGowan tells the true story of what happened when Craig’s determination to build…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
Porn re-inserts itself into the art house with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult-industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star — two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex…
The lauded golden age of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grownups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
Five Easy Pieces was a turning point for both its star, Jack Nicholson, and director Bob Rafelson when it came out in 1970 (they’d already collaborated on the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head). Nicholson, who’d previously worked on a series of B-movie projects with Roger Corman and also tried his hand…
In 1994 there was a mass killing in the central African country of Rwanda, where the two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, were in conflict. After the assassination of the country’s president, the Hutu population began a systematic attack on the Tutsi; the deaths over over 500,000…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era–a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable and the…
