In the world of In a World…, the directing debut of preternaturally understated comic actress Lake Bell, voiceover work — specifically, the authoritative yet anonymous man-speak heard in movie trailers — is a field in which women aren’t welcome. Bell, who also wrote the script, plays Carol, an underemployed vocal…
Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate-catfight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he loved —…
Director Shola Lynch has been mining the rich terrain of black American history for a while now, notably in the award-winning 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, about the 1972 presidential campaign by the late congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American and the first woman to mount a serious,…
An average episode of the 1989-1999 cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and his robot buddies heckle bad movies, runs about 90 minutes. The 1955 film This Island Earth is 87 minutes. The 1996 feature Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, in which the man and…
Friends and filmmakers Jesse Zook Mann and Evan Kleinman decided to go deeper into Judaism, in search of the more edgy side of contemporary Jewish life, and the result was the documentary Punk Jews. It’s a sixty-minute, multi-faceted portrait of a global community, told in six stories, including that of…
The Italian film industry is known for its knock-offs — cheap, tawdry, ramshackle productions that would borrow elements from popular films to create second-rate copies for a quick buck. Despite the methods, several of these Italian genres produced some beloved films — most notably the so-called “spaghetti Westerns” — while…
The summer-slasher Sleepaway Camp has been slowly amassing a cult audience over the past thirty years. In many ways it’s a standard slasher, built on a series of gruesome murder set pieces, but its odd moments and bizarre-twist ending go a long way to set it apart from its more…
The influence of Sid Caesar’s early television variety series Your Show of Shows runs deep, and the 1982 comedy My Favorite Year, inspired by an actual appearance on the show by the charming but washed-up actor Errol Flynn, plays like an inside joke. As with TV’s The Dick Van Dyke…
“You’ve got red on you.” Don’t like that one? How about “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” — which serves as a clever callback to the movie that birthed the modern zombie. Maybe you prefer something like the creatively cursed “Fuck-a-doodle-doo!” There’s no question that the abundance of quotable lines…
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…
Tilikum, the 12,000-pound bull orca whose big splashes still climax daily SeaWorld shows, has been implicated in three human deaths, spread over his three decades of forced performances: Two trainers, twenty years apart, and a drifter who in 1999 apparently hid in the park and dove into the wrong pool…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at its core. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high-school twerp dons a wetsuit and…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture — in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh,…
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…
