In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing…,” the 21st century’s most…
Words can’t do justice to the singular power of Keith Maitland’s documentary Tower, a you-are-there reconstruction of the harrowing 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, where 25-year-old former Marine and engineering student Charles Whitman planted himself in the school’s clock tower and shot 49 people, killing…
Christopher Guest’s films mostly deal with passionate but ordinary people who aspire to positions of status within strange little subcultures: mid-century folk music, dog shows, community theater or, in the case of his new mockumentary, Mascots, the world of sports-mascot competitions. In the alternate universe of Guest’s first film in…
Don’t ever make the mistake of dismissing James Ivory’s E.M. Forster adaptation Howards End as a mere “costume drama.” Yes, the characters wear corsets and evening suits and talk through manners and inheritance. But in its own way, Ivory’s film — which has been newly restored and is being re-released,…
The most destructive villain in this year’s summer movies isn’t some super-powered fiend. It’s us, the consumers of North America, whose desires shape the world. The U.S. looms over Jayro Bustamante’s patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante’s…
Even those of us with a soft spot for dumb, high-concept Hollywood comedies might be outraged by the limp, unfunny nothingburger that is Keeping Up with the Joneses. A wan attempt to mix the comedy of domestic anxiety with the comedy of inept espionage — think Neighbors meets Central Intelligence…
Like the rambling fixer-upper at its heart, Merchant Ivory’s Howards End has aged quite well, and not just because of the brightened-up 4K restoration from Cohen Media Group. It’s brisk and funny, prim but open-minded, testy about pomposity even as it exemplifies what once was the most pompous of all…
When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities, it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people residing on the prairies and in the small towns dotting the throughways, it is simply life, with a capital “L.” In…
Have there ever been entertainment-media product tie-ins like the Ouija movies? The shriekingly enjoyable Ouija: Origin of Evil, like its less successful 2014 predecessor Ouija, lays out as its best case that the toy it’s advertising will destroy your life, maybe kill your family and damn your very soul. 30…
With opening night for the 39th Denver Film Festival right around the corner, the Denver Film Society – who produces the fest – announced today that the premiere screening of Damien Chazelle’s (Whiplash) modern musical La La Land will have a little Hollywood sparkle, courtesy of an appearance by the filmmaker and…
Though the hotel was mum on details, it’s safe to say Robert Redford and Jane Fonda were filming scenes for the Netflix-produced film Ours Souls at Night, which is based on the Kent Haruf book set in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado, at the Brown Palace on Monday, October 17. …
The Thing died a noisy death when it debuted in 1982. In fact, this masterful paranoiac thriller about a vicious shape-shifting alien infiltrating a group of scientists stationed in Antarctica bombed so hard that director John Carpenter was fired from his follow-up gig working on Firestarter. (Roller Boogie director Mark…
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience might be the most narrative film of Terrence Malick’s career. The enigmatic director’s recent work has been marked by a turn toward elliptical, stream-of-consciousness meditations, pretty much discarding any semblance of conventional storytelling. But going as far back as Badlands (1973), he’s had a…
As has been widely noted, Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes isn’t really a television series; its six episodes are not particularly self-contained, and plot developments crest and climax willy-nilly regardless of where each segment ends. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the longest one Allen’s ever made, and with the option…
“As it always happens in the Chris Guest movies, we really don’t talk to each other before we get to set,” Jane Lynch says, explaining how she creates her menagerie of characters, specifically Gabby Monkhouse from Guest’s newest mockumentary, Mascots. “A couple months before, I got a call from Chris,…
Season three of Amazon’s Transparent has few of the cratering events that have marked our time with the Pfeffermans up to this point, but it continues to reward thinking viewers as it considers issues of gender and identity, the intersection of theory and reality, the lingering impact of sexual abuse…
“We’re all terrified of forgetting what he looked like or sounded like,” says David Wheeler in Newtown, Kim A. Snyder’s transfixing documentary portrait of collective grief and resilience. Wheeler, like many of the bereaved parents and siblings interviewed for Snyder’s film, finds some comfort in old photos and home movies,…
“Shit’s getting ugly in the RuPaul Drag Race.” —Janae, Orange Is the New Black RuPaul’s All Stars 2 has been perhaps the greatest season of the only reality-TV competition that matters. Logo TV’s Emmy-winning series is not only a mainstream ingress into a historically devalued, antinormative art form for an…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she’s made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing “Dream Baby Dream” and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across…
Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are a rarity in the comedy world: funny people with hearts of gold. It was obvious all those years when they were cast members on Saturday Night Live. They handled their characters — whether living, dead or purely fictional — with a visible sweetness. Think…
