Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous, freewheeling, semi-autobiographical Something in the Air is an ode to both youth’s universal qualities and the specifics of Assayas’s youth in particular. The picture opens in the suburbs just outside Paris in 1971, among a group of teenage students still energized by the explosive student and worker…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to project whatever…
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and were also, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I found myself more and more often invoking the name of Ray Harryhausen, who died on Tuesday, May 7,…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days, he prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are…
Anyone who’s familiar with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford should recognize the scenes and shots from trailers for the 2013 version, which opens Friday with Leonardo DiCaprio. Here, in animated GIFs, are shot-by-shot comparisons from the 1974 version and the 2013 version — which will…
The idea for The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival began when poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins realized he was the guy who could make it happen. “I’m a video poet and had a lot of success with my stuff overseas — I was noticing a lot of really talented filmmakers…
Good things sometimes come in small packages, and that’s certainly the case with Westword MasterMind Johnny Morehouse’s long-running Five Minute Film Fest, a showcase of short shorts that pack a lot of punch in five minutes or less. Its latest incarnation has found a home at Deer Pile, and because…
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…
Iron Man 3 opens this week. For some viewers, the film’s appeal isn’t the eponymous superhero, but the sarcastic-yet-sensitive hero behind the gravity-defying, repulsor-ray-shooting suit of armor. I refer, of course, to Shane Black. Iron Man 3’s co-writer–director recharged the buddy-cop flick in the ’80s with his screenplay for Lethal…
Over the course of its first sixty minutes, Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share proves a testament to its director’s enduring reputation as a master of British cinema and the social-realist form, articulating the frustrations of Glasgow’s working class with clarity and sophistication. Robbie (non-actor Paul Brannigan) is a brash ne’er-do-well…
Where has Robert Downey Jr. gone? There’s no doubt he’s the star of Iron Man 3; he sprints through the picture like a neurotic panther. And yet he’s absent, detached in a Zen-like way from the whole affair. The nakedness that defines his best performances — in any role, up…
End of days or the beginning of new ways of seeing? Fittingly, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, an all-senses-consuming chronicle of a fishing trawler, takes its title from the sea beast described in the Book of Job, lines from which constitute the film’s epigraph: “He makes the depths churn…
To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron Man 3, especially the long, kabooming climax. And, like you, I found myself wishing that Robert Downey Jr. had something deeper to play, and that the character had…
Before the original Alien clinched stardom for director Ridley Scott, back when Blade Runner was just a twinkle in Scott’s imaginative eye, there was his first film, The Duellists, a Napoleonic-era yarn based on a slip of a real incident that was later embellished into a short story by Joseph…
Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia O’Keeffe has been done to death — on greeting cards, calendars and posters. That’s why it’s easy to forget that in the first half of the twentieth century, she was one of America’s most significant early modernists. And with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, she crusaded for the…
An ostensibly feel-good French-Canadian comedy about artificial insemination gone awry, Ken Scott’s Starbuck mainly makes you feel like taking a shower. The protagonist is a hapless forty-year-old Montreal bachelor named David (Patrick Huard, resembling a younger, hunkier Daniel Auteuil, without the wild-eyed intensity), whose life is turned upside down when…
The meek shall inherit the Earth,” somebody said once — probably Truffaut. Two pictures into his thrilling career, writer-director Antonio Campos seems determined to show us that that might not be anything to celebrate. Campos’s feature debut, 2008’s Afterschool, was essentially one part Blow Up to three parts Rushmore-as-psychological-horror-flick. While…
Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) believes life has cheated him. Doesn’t America promise riches and luxury to people who deserve it? He’s worked hard to build his body into a hulking knot of muscles; success should follow. But Lugo — the lead in Pain & Gain, Michael Bay’s neon-noir ode to…
Though he’s long been among the most recognizable celebrities in the world, Tom Cruise has always seemed vaguely irritating, like the popular kid at school everybody secretly dislikes. His is an odd sort of fame: Globally recognized but rarely acclaimed, he remains more reliably bankable than nearly any other actor…
Just as Mad Men charms its viewers by using sex, drugs, snappy banter and pretty people to make heavy topics (sexism, racism, dreams diffused) palatable, the editors of Mad Men, Mad World trust that some TV glamour will get readers interested in digesting academic theories. It’s not wrong. Full of…
