Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest(Fox)As someone with no use for Seth MacFarlane’s potty-mouthed Simpsons rip, I’ll admit to choking out a few giggles during his Star Wars send-up — though, truth be told, it’s slightly less daring than Spaceballs and, sure, Porn Wars. Stunningly faithful to the 30-year-old franchise, MacFarlane’s…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
According to filmmaker and actor Ash Christian, I am a fat girl. So is he. As explained in Christian’s debut film, Fat Girls, anyone can be a fat girl, regardless of gender or body mass index. A fat girl is anyone who doesn’t fit in, who’s too quirky for the…
It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…
Having a child destroys your immune system to horror, real or imagined. Before the blessed event, you could laugh off The Exorcist, The Omen, or any of a thousand gory shockers with some wide-eyed tyke as either the prey or the spawn of Beelzebub. Afterward, you can’t even see the…
Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star-producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years, he’s pulled up stakes in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG family…
Joshua (Fox)George Ratliff’s movie, a sort of satirical take on Rosemary’s Baby, came and went upon its release; seems no one got the joke about how parents (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga, in this case) are scared shitless of their own children — especially the titular Joshua, played by Jacob…
Color as Field. It’s no exaggeration to say that Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 is one of the best shows presented in Denver in a generation. Filled with a who’s who of American art — Still, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Stella — it’s like a brief vacation into a world where…
Jane Austen is an anomaly. No other author aside from Shakespeare has sustained such modern acclaim and interest. The evidence is abundant: Austen’s success on the big screen includes classic versions, such as the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, Emma, as well as modern takes on Austen’s stories, such as 1995’s…
A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…
The story of how The Kite Runner’s Homayoun Ershadi got into movies is a bit like those fanciful tales of stars and starlets discovered by casting agents while sitting at the soda counter in Schwab’s Pharmacy. Only, in Ershadi’s case, he was driving his Range Rover through the streets of…
Eastern Promises(Universal)David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen are becoming a Bizarro World Hitchcock/Cary Grant combo, and the world is a better (and bloodier) place for it. Chucklehead critics too smitten by Cronenberg’s “messages” dismissed this film — a vicious and brilliant exploration of the Russian mob in London — for being…
American Art Invitational. Art, like politics, can be divided into liberal and conservative camps, with contemporary art representing the left and traditional art the right. But unlike politics, where the baton can pass back and forth between the two opposites, the art world has been run decisively by the liberals…
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Warner Bros.) — It’s the collector’s-set briefcase that seals the deal, a gunmetal-gray case that all but shouts “Completist dork!” Also: There’s damned near every single version imaginable, plus a making-of doc almost as essential as any iteration of the movie itself. Film school in…
It’s that time of year again. Our six critics (Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor and Robert Wilonsky) don’t always — or often — agree, but we’ve combined their top ten lists, allowing for ties, to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the ten…
How tough is it for a movie to find its audience, above the din of blockbuster marketing and beyond the clogged distribution pipeline? Tsai Ming-liang, the Taiwanese/Malaysian director regarded as one of the world’s greats, had two films in U.S. theaters this year, The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want…
It was only a couple of years ago that the horror genre seemed newly resurgent, like an undead killer digging himself out of the grave. “Fresh faced” directors like Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Darren Lynn Bousman and James Wan — many of whom were dubbed “The Splat Pack” — seemed…
An acquaintance who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq says he has no use for documentaries about George Bush’s bungling of the war on terror. He has not and will not see a single one of the movies made about the tragic consequences of the administration’s rush to drop bombs…
The year: 2505. Your viewing choices tonight: an oldie but a goodie — a picture called Ass, a feature-length screensaver of butt cheeks punctuated by the occasional fart — or the hit TV show Ow! My Balls, a connoisseur’s compendium of nut-sack whacks. Thanks to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, we have…
Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so wide since independent film became a force to be reckoned with. Many…
Absolutely, unequivocally, this has been the Year of the Apatow: Judd got Knocked Up to the tune of $150 million (at the box office alone); the super-okay Superbad, which Apatow produced, grossed another $120 million, “gross” being the operative word; and at year’s end, he walks hard to the finish…
The first thing you notice when you walk on to the set are the 300 extras in late-1920s period costume, seated at cafeteria tables in a holding area, gazing up at you in their wool suits (for the men) and cloche hats (for the women) as if all of this…
