The late Paul Walker practiced the kind of manly American acting that often doesn’t look like acting at all. In movie after movie, many of them of the fast and/or furious variety, Walker performed the difficult trick of seeming to really be the apple-pie tough guys he played. In those…
The humanist virtues of John Sayles are readily apparent in the first scenes of Go for Sisters, his low-key border-crossing road trip mystery. Straight off, the writer-director-novelist treats us to two knotty, compelling monologues, a pair of showstoppers in the first 10 minutes, each delivered by characters you don’t see…
In case you didn’t get enough of David Tennant in the hour-and-a-half 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who (we know we didn’t), you can watch him conquer the role of King Richard II at FilmBar. Fans of the long-running British sci-fi series know Tennant as the lovable and quirky tenth…
2013 was a good year to be bad. This year’s best villains weren’t just goons with guns — although there were a few great examples of those. (Here’s looking at you, Sean Penn.) We also hissed at slave-owners, inventors, seducers, producers, and a couple of amazing women who left an…
Downton Abbey withdrawal? We feel you. While this show’s U.K. fans have already enjoyed season five across the pond, we American Anglophiles await its January 5 return to PBS Masterpiece Theater. In between practicing our British accents and convincing ourselves that Matthew Crawley is simply taking a post-crash nap, we’ve…
The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he’s a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, he hasn’t been able to re-adjust to…
The big problem with pinup queen Bettie Page — maybe the only problem — is that her image inspires so many easy bromides about how she made sex seem fun and playful, and how she’s a great role model for modern women who want to feel comfortable with their sexuality…
Michel Gondry likes video stores. He is, after all, the director of the ultimate VHS sonnet, Be Kind Rewind, in which Jack Black and Mos Def re-create classics like Ghostbusters from plastic bags and tinsel. (Sad about the death of Blockbuster? Give it a watch.) One night, Gondry was browsing…
Here’s a question you never thought you’d hear Noam Chomsky answer: “What makes you happy?” That puzzler comes near the end of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated marvel of a film rigged to set your brain off like fireworks. The great linguist and activist’s easy surge…
History buffs and Southwest aficionados take note. Denver-based director Ethan Knightchilde’s documentary Ghosts of the West is playing at FilmBarfor a special one-night-only event hosted by local historian Marshall Shore. Ten years in the making, his haunting look at ghost towns has been wildly popular, selling out its screenings in…
Warren Miller’s Ticket to Ride comes to the Valley this month December to help celebrate the much anticipated winter months. The legendary film series takes world-class athletes from around the globe to different snowy destinations where the athletes can ski, snowboard, show off their talents, and enjoy the scenery of…
If you’re looking to turn your holiday cheer into a little holiday fear, look no further than FilmBar’s free screening of the murder mash-up that is Road Rash…
Photo by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle – © 2012 – OB Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.Download this week’s Voice Film Club podcast before you get on the plane or maybe listen to it on your way to a restaurant where you’ll eat turkey and get a little drunk on red wine.”I…
Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…
The great sins of the 20th century already are too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from parents deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside Man, last year’s…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are 15 docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…
Images courtesy Lionsgate.Ritchman and Schlund in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.By Carolina del Busto In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, opening this Friday, Alan Ritchson and Stephanie Leigh Schlund play two of the story’s fiercest bad guys. But tucked away in a hotel room on the 17th floor of the…
It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young adult literature over the past 10 years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre’s bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice…
Once, in the middle of the 2004 Tour de France bicycling race, the nine-man American team, led by Lance Armstrong, pretended that its bus had broken down en route to its hotel. As fans and the international press stood outside, cheering and taking pictures, the team, hidden behind high, tinted…
In 1997, 87-year-old Richard Lusk flew from California to Florida to claim an $11 million prize he believed he’d won in a sweepstakes. The day after he returned home empty-handed, he had a stroke. Four months later, he bought a second plane ticket to Florida and stubbornly knocked on their…
