What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies, and then watch in horror — and a touch of self-congratualtory awe — as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise comes lessons,…
A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders’s latest (written…
Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’s documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips. It’s a smashing supplement to Truffaut’s classic study. It’s…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had helmed one of Nantucket’s…
After two long months of public voting and friendly campaigning, Coors Light just announced that the Denver Film Society’s Joanna Cintrón has been named the 2015 Coors Light Líder of the Year. The honor comes with a $25,000 grant from Coors Light that Cintrón will use to introduce a Latino…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Through the ornate fonts, tints, intertitles, scores, acting techniques and camera tricks that have made his “directed by” credit the ultimate redundancy, Guy Maddin demonstrates in The Forbidden Room that he has forgotten more about silent movies and early talkies than almost anyone else will ever know. And it’s the…
O, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I’ll bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’s 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
In 2007, director Michael Dougherty served up a basketful of cinematic candy when his debut, Trick ‘r Treat — a creepy, scary love letter to the true spirit of Halloween — lit up horror film festivals. Delighted audiences announced that a new master of horror had been born. But the film’s…
The frost of winter is upon us all and with it, the need and desire to seek refuge around a warm flame and bide the time until the new year dawns and the seeds of thaw can be planted. While some seek a roaring fire for their heat others seek…
Soon it will be time to hang our stockings with care, but even well before Santa visits, we geeks will be awash in gifts. December is far from the most geek friendly month of the year, but there’s still no shortage of nerdy fun to be had. From Star Wars celebrations…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
The big breakthrough in Legend, the latest well-crafted studio throwback from writer-director Brian Helgeland? Here, at long last, is a movie with two often incomprehensible Tom Hardy characters, sometimes muttering their Cockney curses at each other inside the same scene. Hardy plays twins, real-life gangsters who ruled London’s East End…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or, really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come un-freighted with expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history: Check…
It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were…
Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like a costumed kid playing actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you could…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since the Hunger Games movies started, in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else…
