Among the revelations you’re likely to experience during the course of Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter’s vital, moving new HBO documentary (premiering July 1) about the struggle of conscience waged by public defenders in the deep South: “Everyone is so young.” Not just the suspects — mostly black and mostly broke…
Before he was one of cinema’s finest dramatists (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces), writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was a provocateur and a satirist. The 63-year-old filmmaker harks back to that past with his first comedy in nearly 25 years, I’m So Excited!, a lighthearted, ensemble-driven bit…
If you’ve never seen Sandra Bullock blow a peanut shell out of her nose, and you’d like to, The Heat is your movie. That’s not meant sarcastically: It’s one of the highlights of this often dismal but occasionally inspired comedy from Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, which pits Bullock’s hoity-toity…
Steve Martin and I go back a long way. I remember Steve from his SNL days, playing the banjo with an arrow through his head, a wild and crazy guy who perfected his idiot role in such movies as The Jerk (1979) and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982). Yes,…
Crispin Hellion Glover is many things. He’s a cult figure, known for his baffling performance art-like appearance on David Letterman, as well as a decidedly outsider filmmaker who creates offbeat art films featuring actors with Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy. He’s a musician who once did a spine-chillingly wondrous rendition…
Charles Partridge Adams. Rocky Mountain Majesty: The Paintings of Charles Partridge Adams highlights the career of a prominent turn-of-the-nineteenth-century impressionist who lived and worked in Colorado for decades. Adams first came to Colorado in 1876, when he was only eighteen years old. He was self-taught, but worked informally in Denver…
The writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt, who pounced on the opportunity to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, resulting in her controversial pronouncement about the disparity between “the mediocrity of the man” and “the horror of the deeds,” is brought to life by a mesmerizing Barbara Sukowa in a new film…
In Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Iron Man gets off a good burn on Thor during their intramural fight in the woods: “Shakespeare in the park?” he says. “Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?” Like any good Shakespearean pastiche, The Avengers began in medias res, with a glowy cube thing…
Delicacy of touch isn’t a particularly valued commodity among American filmmakers. We like pioneer swagger in our directors; particularly in the age of the blockbuster, open-ended questions and eyelash-fringe feelings are suspect. That’s why it’s always been hard to know how to categorize Sofia Coppola, one of our most gifted…
Sometimes, there’s just too damn much to say about a movie than can fit into any one review. (Even Stephanie Zacharek’s exhaustive, excellent one.) So here’s more: Stephanie Zacharek, our lead film critic, and film editor Alan Scherstuhl hashing over all the portentous craziness in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel…
By weaving together the stories behind New York City cocktail lair Employees Only and Westport, Connecticut, corner bar Dunvilles, director Douglas Tirola takes on the changing world of bartending and the rise of craft mixology in his recently released documentary Hey Bartender. And while the film focuses on a pair…
I recognize that, even coming from a father of two preteen daughters, that might sound alarmist, so let me elaborate—the Disney Channel and its prime competitor, Nickelodeon’s Teen Nick, are a pox upon our tween nation, corrosive forces that impart more awful messages than any of Disney’s retrograde princess films…
I try not to interject my pushy self into these posts, dear readers, but American Graffiti is personal. I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen this movie — in dark theaters, over a big Red Moon pizza at the Cinderella Twin, on television, on video and DVD and probably…
Charles Partridge Adams. Rocky Mountain Majesty: The Paintings of Charles Partridge Adams highlights the career of a prominent turn-of-the-nineteenth-century impressionist who lived and worked in Colorado for decades. Adams first came to Colorado in 1876, when he was only eighteen years old. He was self-taught, but worked informally in Denver…
Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It’s fun, easygoing, and it lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning. It’s clear that director Douglas Tirola is passionate about…
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI’ed-to-death climax and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there’s greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman: moments…
From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the past twenty years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to have made…
Charles Partridge Adams. Rocky Mountain Majesty: The Paintings of Charles Partridge Adams highlights the career of a prominent turn-of-the-nineteenth-century impressionist who lived and worked in Colorado for decades. Adams first came to Colorado in 1876, when he was only eighteen years old. He was self-taught, but worked informally in Denver…
You’re either with Brit Marling or you’re against her. The 29-year-old blond filmmaker (who describes herself on Twitter as a tree climber/actor/writer/producer) catapulted out of obscurity in 2011 with two obfuscatory indies — Sound of My Voice and the mournful sci-fi drama Another Earth. Marling specializes in films about faith,…
It’s to the great detriment of The Kings of Summer that it follows the identically premised Mud by just weeks. Both films tell bittersweet coming-of-age stories about teenage friends who learn how to become men in a soon-to-be-corrupted Eden, and both are questionably embellished by a predictable teen romance, an…
Treating teenage growing pains with a sensitivity that frequently trips into singer-songwriter-ish mushiness, Tiger Eyes nonetheless stands as a respectable first cinematic adaptation of a Judy Blume novel. Directed and co-written by the author’s son, Lawrence, Blume’s tale follows fifteen-year-old Davey (Willa Holland, right) as she relocates, in the wake…
George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows if he were put in charge of them. Here’s what he dashed off for us, in between shouting descriptions of imaginary feasts…
