Screen
reel to reel | Week of Oct. 6, 2011
1911 Jackie Chan’s 100th movie: Starring Jackie Chan and co-directed by the star and Zhang Li, 1911 tells the story of the founding of the Republic of China when Sun Yat-sens forces overthrew the Ming Dynasty. At Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. — Denver Film Society 50...
Reel to reel | Week of June 21, 2012
17 GIRLS Based on a 2008 headline-grabbing news story about an alleged pregnancy pact among 17 high school girls in the fishing town of Gloucester, Mass. — an act at once unexpected and incomprehensible to adults and boys in their world. At Denver FilmCenter/Colfax...
Partly sunny
To steal from Mother Goose (don’t worry, she’s dead): When Cloud Atlas is good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, Hugo Weaving is doing a drag impression of Nurse Ratched. The ambition of writers/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Twyker, working from David...
Magnifying injustice
A certain segment of the population has always believed Nixon’s War on Drugs to be a tragic waste of time, money and human life. A damning statistic, familiar to those with even a minor interest in the drug boondoggle, comes early in The House I Live In: “Since 1971...
Cookies tossed, paradise lost
Until now, writer/director Harmony Korine’s brand of artistic weirdness has been completely useless. Intentionally obtuse to the point of sloppy goofiness, his work has differed from student films solely because he wasn’t enrolled...
Speedy and irritable
The most important thing to know before attempting to endure the lumbering bore that is Need for Speed is this: every single character in the film is unspeakably dumb. Presumably set in a world where humans never mentally evolved from an animal state, the movie ...