There’s something unsettling about Anne Fontaine’s Adore, and, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with the two middle-aged women who fall in love with each other’s teenage sons in the film. The cougars in question are Lil and Roz, best friends since childhood played with notable earnestness by Naomi Watts…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and that for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to…
Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition and resonance. Easily one of the best…
All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…
As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn’t award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award the second-place prize, the Silver Lion, to six films, among them I Vitelloni and Ugetsu. How did I know this? To celebrate the festival’s 70th edition,…
It’s 8:20 and you’re in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you’re watching a spurned wife cut off her teenage son’s penis–and eat it–as retribution for her husband’s infidelity. Ah, Tuesday. But wow, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius is some movie! If you have…
Theresa Mercado’s Cruel Season series — Cruel Summer, Cruel Autumn and Cruel Winter — is a labor of love. The horror movie fiend launched the series last year and has slowly grown it via word of mouth, as fans tell their friends about her killer film selections and handmade souvenirs…
Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…
The Weinstein Company’s 108-minute cut of The Grandmaster may not be the epic Wong Kar-Wai originally intended, but it’s fleet and silvery in its own right. In the late 1930s, an aging martial-arts master from Northern China, Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang), treks to the South to find its best fighter…
There is a moment of silent incompatibility in Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies that illuminates the entirety of a relationship in a single request. As the lovely, earthy Kate (Olivia Wilde) reclines suggestively on a couch in his tasteful apartment, Chris (Ron Livingston), her gently fussy boyfriend, politely reminds her to…
Since it’s called Austenland, and since it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
Some movies are all about place, and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, a story set on the cusp of change in the resort town, during an in-between time when in real-time the boardwalk’s grand old buildings were giving away to modern casinos, is one of them. Against this no man’s land…
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…
In David Lowery’s sublime new film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), who’s serving 25 to life for armed robbery and wounding a cop during a shootout, frequently puts pencil to parchment paper and writes love letters to his girlfriend, Ruth (Rooney Mara). Bob’s aching, lovelorn voice can…
The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…
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…
