Back for a 15th year, the Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF), Feb. 28–March 3, has expanded its usual scope. With over 50 features and shorts screening, 2019 marks the first year the festival extends to Fort Collins for an additional … Continue reading Adventures in Cinema: Previewing the 2019 Boulder International Film Festival
Cousins Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) have a plan so crazy it just might work: Dig a one-foot-wide, thousand-mile-long tunnel from Kansas to New Jersey, install a fiber optic cable and strip an algorithm down to its bare … Continue reading THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT
On the surface, Return to Mount Kennedy, directed by Eric Becker, looks like your typical climbing doc, but Mount Kennedy is anything but. Jumping back and forth between 1965 and 2015, Return to Mount Kennedy focuses on Bobby Whittaker, a constant presence in the 1980s–’90s … Continue reading Bobby Whittaker on RETURN TO MOUNT KENNEDY
There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a womancannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art. So wrote Alice Guy-Blaché in the … Continue reading BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE
Picking up shortly after the events in How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014), How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World thrusts Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his trusty dragon, Toothless, into the world of adulthood. Accompanying the Chief of Berk are Astrid (America … Continue reading HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD
On Sept. 1, 2013, Hayao Miyazaki, the imaginative creator of My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, Spirited Away, and The Wind Rises, announced his retirement. Cameras flashed, and reporters asked questions. This wasn’t the first time the 72-year-old animator claimed he was stepping … Continue reading NEVER-ENDING MAN: HAYAO MIYAZAKI (終わらない人 宮崎駿)
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —1 Corinthians 13: 11–12, King James Version Can randomness … Continue reading NEVER LOOK AWAY (WERK OHNE AUTOR)
All the best movies elicit our emotions—Roger Ebert famously called these movies “empathy machines”—but there is a fine line between an emotion earned and an emotion provoked. Movies that hopscotch across this line are what many dub “Oscar-bait” and the … Continue reading Big Emotions in Small Packages: 2019 Oscar Nominated Short Films
Michael J. Cinema 