You’re either with Brit Marling or you’re against her. The 29-year-old blond filmmaker (who describes herself on Twitter as a tree climber/actor/writer/producer) catapulted out of obscurity in 2011 with two obfuscatory indies — Sound of My Voice and the mournful sci-fi drama Another Earth. Marling specializes in films about faith,…
It’s to the great detriment of The Kings of Summer that it follows the identically premised Mud by just weeks. Both films tell bittersweet coming-of-age stories about teenage friends who learn how to become men in a soon-to-be-corrupted Eden, and both are questionably embellished by a predictable teen romance, an…
Treating teenage growing pains with a sensitivity that frequently trips into singer-songwriter-ish mushiness, Tiger Eyes nonetheless stands as a respectable first cinematic adaptation of a Judy Blume novel. Directed and co-written by the author’s son, Lawrence, Blume’s tale follows fifteen-year-old Davey (Willa Holland, right) as she relocates, in the wake…
George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows if he were put in charge of them. Here’s what he dashed off for us, in between shouting descriptions of imaginary feasts…
Superman is an idea. Okay, fine. Technically he’s an intellectual property—a set of data points slammed together by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the 1930s, sold for $130 to National Allied Publications (later DC Comics/TimeWarner), and subsequently transformed into a nugget of multivariously exploitable content that has netted entertainment…
Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn’t stop Vladimir Putin’s government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the…
Eager young people can’t find jobs; qualified older people can’t find jobs. There’s nothing funny about that, which is exactly why someone ought to be making comedies about it. The Internship, in which downtrodden old-school salespeople Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson enter the 21st century and land internships at Google,…
Last week, EW columnist Mark Harris tweeted a statistic disturbing to anyone who cares about gender equality on the big screen: “It’s now been 61 days since the last wide release of a major studio movie starring a woman.” Unfortunately, that number will only increase—to 84 days—until Sandra Bullock and…
Judy Blume’s first novel, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, was published in 1969, yet it’s only now, 44 years later, that the first big-screen adaptation of her work—Tiger Eyes, based on 1981’s novel of the same name—finally opens in theaters. This is a disgrace. One can…
Movies, like pop music, often seem more momentous in the context of their times. That’s especially true in the case of The Harder They Come; the film, which first screened in the U.S. in 1973, hit at a time when reggae music was not yet a big part of the…
The social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s were fueled by a potent blend of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but only a few select groups elevated that combination to a religion. The Source Family documentary shines a spotlight on one such group, and a strange, fascinating piece of…
When Film on the Rocks announced its 2013 summer line-up and The Big Lebowski was nowhere to be found for the second year in a row, fans were upset. But the Denver Film Society has saved the best for last: The non-profit announced last night at the season opener of…
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
Jean-Luc Godard said, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” But really, all you need is a girl, preferably a charismatic one with a secret in her heart. Director and actress Sarah Polley has found that girl: her own mother. Polley’s documentary, Stories We Tell,…
At last! A documentary about that underexposed group: the 1 percenters in their lair. In Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s, the storied store is presented in cinematic terms as ex-screenwriter Matthew Miele watches decorator David Hoey madly creating window displays of phantasmagorical “installation art” that moves. The film’s climax is…
“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up, just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie—like the posters and commercials—won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the kind of sci-fi play…
Wait, you didn’t know that After Earth, the Will Smith–Jaden Smith sci-fi adventure hitting theaters this weekend, is the latest from Shyamalan, he of The Sixth Sense fame and Lady in the Water infamy? Columbia Pictures has done everything in its power, in both trailers and print and TV advertisements,…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
Nerd. Geek. Dork. By whatever name, these poor, unfortunate souls with bad haircuts, unflattering clothes and few social graces are everywhere. Especially pop culture. Few films have captured the ideal of the awkward, disastrously uncool teen like Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, in the character of Dawn Wiener. The…
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
Taken together, Ulrich Seidl’s three Paradise films will be hard to beat this year for sheer art-house scald. Seidl has a relentless vision, but one worth reckoning with, especially now that he has turned world-class ambitious and crafted his epic: this trilogy of doomed emotional struggle. The first film, Love,…
