The fairy-tale fear of a powerful man stealing children is the infuriating heart of Kids for Cash, a compelling and well-reported documentary look at how Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, teenagers wound up serving bona fide cell time for crimes like slapping a classmate, buying a scooter that turned out to have…
Action heroes with nothing to lose are the best kind, perhaps the only kind worth watching. In the opening seconds of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop, Liam Neeson’s federal air marshal, Bill Marks, slumps in his parked vehicle, sloshing a few glugs of whiskey into a paper cup and stirring it up…
In 1998, Douglas Adams published a sweet, funny essay called “Riding the Rays,” about an excursion to Hayman Island to try a kind of underwater jet-ski device called a Sub Bug because it afforded an opportunity to swim with manta rays. And manta rays are cool. He wrote of his…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t . . . or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric…
It was sad — Jay Leno’s 22 years hosting The Tonight Show ended with all the excitement of a guy farting at the mall. We all talked about his joke stealing and his talk-show stealing and how he’d played to the middle, threw away his talent. We were happy to…
Johnny Minotaur, surrealist poet and artist Charles Henri Ford’s 1971 film, is a lyrical explosion of taboos: Incest, man-boy love and power dynamics, pansexuality and autoeroticism are just a few of the issues he grapples with. After the film was lost for two decades, the New American Cinema Group worked…
Taking a sober look at the thousands of untested household chemicals triggering disease is enough to make a person panic and run for the hills. But the activists and filmmakers behind The Human Experiment, which screens on Saturday, February 22 as part of the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, do just…
As the Denver Film Society prepares to celebrate the worst movies of 2013 at tonight’s Golden Raspberry party, Westword asked a few players (those that were brave enough to talk about it) in the local film about which flicks they think were the biggest flops. See also: PBBT! Pronouncing the…
Gayle Crites and Andrew Beckham. As she usually does, Tina Goodwin has paired a couple of solos at her namesake gallery, with one in the larger front space and the other in the smaller corridor in back. At first glance, Gayle Crites: The Cloth That Binds appears to be an…
Basically a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to the female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is also a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, however, In Secret…
Two words uttered in the dark — “What happened?” — open The Square, Jehane Noujaim’s powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt’s struggle for meaningful change. Several documentaries on the country’s 2011 uprising, including Uprising and Tahrir: Liberation Square, rushed to answer that question, and suffered from a certain shortsightedness as a…
In If You Build It, a documentary about a high-concept high school product-design class in, of all places, rural North Carolina, director Patrick Creadon collects rich material but builds a rickety structure. The program is Studio H, led by two enterprising, idealistic architects who are brought to rural Bertie County…
No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter or an Internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past thirty years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or at least remake…
In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…
Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…
Gayle Crites and Andrew Beckham. As she usually does, Tina Goodwin has paired a couple of solos at her namesake gallery, with one in the larger front space and the other in the smaller corridor in back. At first glance, Gayle Crites: The Cloth That Binds appears to be an…
It’s a little sad that Colin Farrell has outgrown roles that require him to wear raggedy sweaters and say things like “For fook’s sake!” It had to happen, though. Farrell has always made a terrific bad boy, but he clearly knows he couldn’t be a scamp forever, and he seems…
The seemingly innocuous school interview that opens writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime Like Father, Like Son is actually a master class in foreshadowing, as its banal questions and calculated answers turn out to be carefully laid tripwires for the thematic concerns of the film. Those include the roles nature and nurture…
Congratulations, Detroit. In 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop cemented it as the most violent city in the world, an honor the Motor City resented for decades until its powers-that-be realized they may as well erect a statue of Peter Weller and milk the tourism. Twenty-seven years later, the attention has shifted…
Director José Padilha’s long-delayed RoboCop reboot has arrived, and it’s neither an unalloyed (see what I did there?) triumph nor the travesty that partisans of Paul Verhoeven’s subversive Reagan-era classic had feared. At least, and at most, it’s different, taking bold liberties with the original text, as remakes should. One…
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint the typical Berlin Film Festival film, I’ve attended the festival enough times to attest that most pictures in the competition lean toward the somber end of the scale: You’re more likely to see a drama about immigrants in tough circumstances or children left to fend…
