It’s tempting to suggest that if you have any interest in Iranian film in general, or in particular Asghar Farhadi — the director and writer of that shred-your-heart masterpiece A Separation — you should simply get yourself to Farhadi’s About Elly without knowing a thing about it besides its title…
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth, and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…
Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…
Diane Keaton thinks her new film is delightfully ironic. Richard Loncraine’s 5 Flights Up is the latest in that burgeoning genre, Retiree Real Estate Romantic Comedy, where cool, gray-haired New Yorkers realize they can barely afford to live in the city where they fell in love. Keaton plays a teacher…
Avengers: Age of Ultron director and screenwriter Joss Whedon wants to give us everything in his movie, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat, writes LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson in her review of the film, which opens May 1. Joining her on…
Two powerhouses of modern comedy — one intentional, one less so — come together for one glorious night tomorrow at RiffTrax Live: The Room. The original RiffTrax for the film is one of the crew’s most popular ever, but for this live event they’ve gone back to the well for…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
A post-Wikipedia biographical documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck finds Brett Morgen constructing a feature-length collage of notebook entries, demo tapes, rehearsal footage, home movies, archival photos, and drawings and artwork by the late Nirvana frontman. It’s an impressive, comprehensive assemblage, designed to impart not a point-by-point historical account but,…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute — not necessarily because they feel the passage of time so intensely, but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change over the years, we…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies, and at least ten films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity…
The third chapter of the Stanley Film Festival rolls into Estes Park this week, like a spirit-soaked fog hovering over the spooky Stanley Hotel, filling the place with the best horror films and festivities for a celebration of cinematic goosebumps. On the fright frontline is Matthew Campbell, a programmer who spends…
Last summer, the fate of the 88 Drive-In — one of the last drive-ins left in the state — looked uncertain. The small operation in Commerce City was trying to make the expensive and inevitable transition to digital projection, as 35mm film was becoming extinct. On top of that, owner…
Unfriended On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the…
I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. “You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up, and started churning out indie movies justifying why.” In the ’40s, men fought wars at eighteen. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock faced accusations…
It might seem hard to believe in these days of Furious 7, but cinema did not start with an ear-splitting, seat-shaking bang. For decades, filmmakers had to rely on crafting stories that entranced and enthralled audiences without making a sound. And Howie Movshovitz, director of the Denver Silent Film Festival,…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies that God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon and screams…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy in which all of the…
In Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, the Zellner Brothers — David and Nathan — offer a haunting meditation on the relationship between truth and fiction, and between desire and belief. Based on an urban legend about a Japanese woman who died looking for the cash hidden at the end of the…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in…
Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
As a character, Games of Thrones stable boy (and friend of Bran Stark) Hodor doesn’t have much to say, except for his own name. Turns out it’s not even his real name, though everyone thinks it is. But in real life, hulking Kristian Nairn, the actor who plays him, does…
