Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. As it happens, the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate, suspenseful Western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect any rousing…
Fans have been lining up at theaters across the country since Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered. But Zach Putnam was not among them. He’s been waiting for this movie, but is willing to wait still longer for the reviews. Because in the interim, he had time to create this…
Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight opens this week, the latest chapter in a long tradition of Westerns filmed in Colorado. The state’s epic scenery has made this a destination for filmmakers for more than a century, and many of them made Westerns. From film’s beginnings to the early 1960s, Westerns were…
A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a ten-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…
Here’s a true story about a St. Louis murder that changed America. In 1837, a black freeman named Francis McIntosh stepped off a Mississippi riverboat and blundered into two white cops chasing a drunk sailor who’d called them names. They ordered McIntosh to stop the perp; when he refused, they…
George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful forked over their dollars. Then both Lucas and Hubbard mucked up their simple premise with add-ons like…
The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse, Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the world’s first sexual-reassignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script…
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…
