Screen
Going gaga for Kojo
Writer/director Blitz Bazawule’s first feature-length film feels exactly like someone telling you about a dream they had. Only you’re actually interested in it, and...
A knife in the water and the snakes in the grass
In the history of cinema, there are few feature debuts as mysterious, haunting and assured as Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water. Yes, that...
Iron performance
On the surface, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might not seem like a good subject for a biopic. She wasn’t flamboyant, there’s no romantic back-story, and she was more known for her steel will than her diplomacy. In these politically charged times, ...
The black market meets the stock market
Killing Them Softly is an ambitious mashup of black market and stock market politics, wrapped in the guise of a straight-up crime movie. If that sounds like it’d be hard to pull off, it is. If you think it’s too much for one film, you’re right. Killing Them Softly ...
How to live a good life
Ask Boulder filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll when she got the idea for her latest documentary, A Small Good Thing, and she’ll go back a lot further than you might expect: “From as long as I can remember, even as a little girl, I was always asking people, ‘What is ...
Cross-cultural animation
Five years ago, the Bristol, England-based Aardman animation folks — who created the stop-motion legends Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep and therefore are eligible for sainthood — made the digitally animated British/American co-production Flushed Away. Jam-...
reel to reel | Week of July 28, 2011
The 400 Blows François Truffaut sensitively re-creates the trials of his own difficult childhood in The 400 Blows, the film that marked his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs and signaled the beginning of the French New Wave. Talk back after 7 p.m. ...
Dwarfing expectations
We are masters of cynicism, proudly sporting a black belt in backlash. If this generation of critics, pseudo-critics and armchair-article-writing audience members given the bully pulpit of social media has any legacy, it will be bitching for bitching’s sake...
