For four seasons, Breaking Bad has chronicled the journey of Walter White from “Mr Chips to Scarface,” as creator Vince Gilligan puts it. The end of the last season saw White taking out his number one adversary in spectacular fashion, marking the beginning of the final phase of his transformation…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern-Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s six-year-old (also Wallis’s age during filming) protagonist and narrator,…
Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary — and not just those about religious longing and “spirituality,” its ostensible subjects, but about how deep the genre that gave us Borat and Morgan Spurlock’s spotty oeuvre can go. Kumaré is essentially the…
Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, Goodbye First Love, begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a highly emotional high school girl in love, is fifteen, and tracks her through her mid-twenties as she’s establishing a career. We first follow Camille through her all-consuming romance with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a…
From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to play-acting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…
The first film from emigré director Pawel Pawlikowski since 2004’s dreamy My Summer of Love, this thoroughly odd and brooding psycho-puzzle trains in on Ethan Hawke’s displaced American writer-academic, arrived in Paris to see his ex-wife and young daughter despite a restraining order, a recent hospital stay and a history…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
1979. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what’s past is irretrievably past. Manhattan’s $39 million take…
The only heavy-metal band in Iraq. A charter school in the most diverse square mile in America. A letter written by a Maine mayor asking Somalis to keep out. Those are the subjects of three of the six documentaries to be screened at the three-day 2012 Refugees In Focus Film…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
A sketchy trifle of French animation grabbing time in theaters thanks to its recent Oscar nomination, Felicioli and Gagnol’s barely-hour-long film A Cat in Paris seeks shelf space beside Sylvain Chomet’s deft and rapturous hand-drawn cartoons (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist), and the required self-conscious Frenchiness is spot-on. But…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
This morning Forge Motion Pictures and Carbondale-based filmmaker Skip Armstrong premiered The Shapeshifter online, the third installment in Armstrong’s five-part Of Souls + Water series profiling paddlers of every stripe and their relationships with the water that connects each of them…
Colorado skateboarders in Colorado don’t need an official holiday to put wheels to pavement: after all, there are 159 skate parks statewide and eight more in development. But last Thursday’s international Go Skateboarding Day celebration still made for a good excuse. The first video from the local festivities is Royal…
Bryan Nash Gill. The front space at Goodwin Fine Art is filled with an installation by nationally known Connecticut artist Bryan Nash Gill, who uses wood as both his material and his method. Nash has created two cubes made of cut-up pine beams. One, left in its natural color, has…
Apocalypse movies are a venerable enough genre (and reliable box-office cash spigots) to support a few lightweight, funny-sad-romantic entries every once in a while. Given the right touch, this approach can be just the antidote to the idea-free, effects-laden blockbusters and art-house pity parties that dominate the form; it’s conceivable…
With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s thirteenth feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a pint-sized Florence Welch. Despite these resemblances, Merida remains an original: Brave, set in the Scottish Highlands in the tenth century, is the animation studio’s first film with a female…
A blanket of white covers Montreal inside and out in Monsieur Lazhar, the understated, affecting Canadian drama recently nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. The schoolyard where Alice (Sophie Nélisse) and Simon (Émilien Néron) exchange their usual morning jabs is capped with snow, and their classroom is filled with…
