Iron Man 3
Can movies be programmed to be hits? A May 5 New York Times article profiles Vinny Bruzzese, a statistician who offers his consulting services to Hollywood and claims that yes, they can. Using past...
View ArticleShort Takes on Film: Docs at Hop, War Witch, Silents in Brandon
Vermont-based filmmaker Eugene Jarecki recently delivered a TEDxHollywood talk on “storytelling in the digital age.” The decade since the start of the Iraq War has seen an incredible democratization of...
View ArticleRenoir
I sense a trend. Film factories are greenlighting fact-based stories pivoting on the intersection of two historically significant lives and then placing the focus on the less compelling personality. A...
View ArticleThe Great Gatsby
“A universe of ineffable gaudiness” — that’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald described the dreamworld inside the head of the young Jay Gatsby. He might just as well have been describing the aesthetic of Baz...
View ArticleBurlington Artist Bobbie Lanahan, Granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald,...
When director Baz Luhrmann went on “The Colbert Report” last week to talk about his new adaptation of The Great Gatsby, he mentioned that a “very regal woman” took him by the hands after the movie’s...
View ArticleA Place at the Table
The documentary is the Debbie Downer of film forms. Over the years, documentaries have evolved into an information-distribution service; a sort of Associated Press for bad news. The networks and great...
View ArticleStar Trek Into Darkness
In my seventh summer as a movie critic, I’ve reached the conclusion that tent-pole films are best taken in small doses — one or two CGI-paloozas per season, say. If your job requires you to see one...
View ArticleThe Hangover Part III
The wolves have packed it in, and you know who I feel sorry for? (Anyone who coughed up 10 bucks for a ticket to this fecal threequel has my deepest condolences, it goes without saying.) I pity poor...
View ArticleFast & Furious 6
Fast & Furious 6 ends with a title card that advises viewers not to try the stunts they’ve just seen at home. This disclaimer set off giggles and guffaws at the Majestic 10, and no wonder. The...
View ArticleShort Takes on Film: Vermont Joy Parade, A Band Called Death
Chances are, if you live in the Burlington area, you’ve seen Ben Aleshire doing stuff around town: typing up poems to order at the farmers market, showing his art at the BCA Center, playing trumpet...
View ArticleNow You See Me
You know a movie hasn’t done the trick when the most entertaining on-camera moment featuring two of its stars isn’t even part of it. Such is the case with Now You See Me, Hollywood’s second magical...
View ArticleAfter Earth
Earth’s climate is screwed, folks like Bill McKibben tell us. If we flatlined our carbon emissions this instant, we’d still have a dark and uncertain future. But Hollywood doesn’t do dark and...
View ArticleThe Internship
Shawn Levy is in no danger of being branded an innovator. Look up “hack” in the dictionary and you’re likely to find a picture of him. Perhaps more than any major filmmaker (I suppose cranking out the...
View ArticleThe Purge
When a movie provokes a ton of earnest online discussion and pisses off the talking heads at FOX News, it can’t be all bad, can it? It can. The Purge is a huge teaser of a daringly absurd premise...
View ArticleFormer Pro Snowboarder Kevin Pearce Has a New Documentary
Two professional snowboarders swoop through the credits of a new documentary, playing an effortless game of follow the leader in a half-pipe. The clip was filmed in 2007. One of the riders — Shaun...
View ArticleThis is the End
Gene Siskel had a reliable rule for reckoning a work of cinema’s worth: “Is this movie more interesting,” he’d ask, “than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” He had a point. Stars...
View ArticleMan of Steel
It’s never boring to see a new take on an old story, even when the results go off the rails. Director Zack Snyder, writer David S. Goyer and cowriter-producer Christopher Nolan appear to have...
View ArticleFilm News: Woodstock's Town Hall Theater Goes Digital; Cartoon College Out on...
The citizens of Woodstock really love their Town Hall Theatre. In 1928, they ponied up to repair it after a fire; in the 1980s, they undertook an extensive restoration. And this past year, when it...
View ArticleWorld War Z
You know you’ve racked up serious mortal mileage when you can remember watching the film that started it all — George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead— with your friends in an old-fashioned movie...
View ArticleBefore Midnight
Watching Before Midnight in a multiplex is a strange experience. Here’s a movie about two people who drive and stroll through the Greek countryside and talk, sometimes in marathon single takes. That’s...
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