Reviews, interviews, and festival coverage for Boulder’s only independent newspaper from 2014 to 2025.
Watching a Stan Brakhage film is like dreaming with your eyes open. The collision of colors and shadows, images overlapping images, distortions, and rapid-fire editing imprints on your eye and synthesizes in your mind. Close your eyes, and what do … Continue reading Celebrating Stan
Judy Garland was born in a trunk. Or so the story goes in A Star Is Born, a movie about an aging actor on his way out, thanks to addiction, and the young starlet he handpicks to bear the burden of … Continue reading JUDY
Somewhere in a remote part of Japan, a film crew is shooting a low-budget zombie movie in an abandoned World War II facility. The two leads are teen heartthrobs, and the director is of the megalomaniac variety. He can’t get … Continue reading ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (カメラを止めるな!)
When writer Paddy Chayefsky penned the script for Network, he stumbled onto something special. When director Sidney Lumet and actors Faye Dunaway and William Holden joined, it became mythical. Released in 1976, Network is a landmark of American cinema. For some, it’s an … Continue reading NETWORK
For Paul Stamets, it begins and ends with mushrooms. From death, they create life. From fractures, they create connections. And from sickness, they create health. “Mushrooms represent rebirth. Rejuvenation. Regeneration,” Stamets says. Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie Schwartzberg and edited by … Continue reading FANTASTIC FUNGI
Ad Astra, from filmmaker par excellence James Gray, opens with a shot of the cosmos, vast and terrifying. As the camera pans across the twinkling dots of a thousand suns, a lens flare catches the frame and briefly illuminates the … Continue reading AD ASTRA
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. —George Eliot, Middlemarch On Jan. 31, 2003, Katherine Gun’s life changed. Gun, a translator, working for the British intelligence agency Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), received an email from … Continue reading OFFICIAL SECRETS
For some, equality is a game of mathematics: Clinical, sterile, and dull. But, high up in the Rocky Mountains at the Telluride Film Festival, equality breathes and moves. Here, women dream film, think film, make film, and talk film. And … Continue reading Women Make Film: Dispatches from the 2019 Telluride Film Festival
Luxury hotels are bizarre, magical places. They are like hermetically sealed chambers where every possible amenity has been accounted for: Food, drink, entertainment, even pieces of art dot endless hallways of carpet and soft lighting. Muzak plays in the background. … Continue reading THE CHAMBERMAID (LA CAMARISTA)
Michael J. Cinema 
You must be logged in to post a comment.