The Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) keeps getting bigger. Helmed once again by Beeck sisters Robin and Kathy, BIFF 16 (March 5-8) offers moviegoers 88 features and shorts to choose from. And, as has become the tradition in recent years, … Continue reading Something for Everyone: 2020 Boulder International Film Festival
Truth is a slippery thing. So are lies. There are bald-faced lies, little white lies, and evasions. But there are also constructs; stories and parables that aren’t necessarily true but point to an underlying and undeniable truth. Where the lies … Continue reading THE TRUTH (LA VÉRITÉ)
The disappearance of a tourist brings two bumbling inspectors to the picturesque seaside town of Slack Bay; a place where a mussel gathering family cradle-carry the wealthy across the bay when the tide is high, wealthy that are too obsessed … Continue reading SLACK BAY
The colors belong to the French flag, the corresponding ideas of the Republic: blue, white, and red—liberty, equality, and fraternity. For France, these colors, these ideas, are political. They guide the nation the way Jefferson’s decree, “We hold these truths … Continue reading THREE COLORS
What stories will this generation tell the ones to come? If the latest output from Hollywood is any indication, they will tell and re-tell the stories of previous generations with slight variations that aren’t adapted but simply repackaged. Hell, if … Continue reading GHOST IN THE SHELL
My grandmother once told me that the greatest pain ever felt by a parent was burying her own child. Nothing could feel more unnatural. Losing a loved one is tragic; losing a child is devastation. That devastation has come to … Continue reading L’ATTESA
If Jean-Luc Godard was correct when he surmised, “The history of cinema is the story of men filming women,” then the French auteur Olivier Assayas’s latest, Clouds of Sils Maria, adds the crucial word missing from that epigraph: young. The cinema is … Continue reading CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
A director only makes one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again. —Jean Renoir That quote applies to many who step behind the camera but fits few quite as snuggly as it does the … Continue reading Leos Carax
Consider what it must have been like for an ant building a hill on the island of Guadalcanal in 1942. You, and a thousand of your closest friends, are going about the business of collecting food and constructing tunnels when … Continue reading GODZILLA
Michael J. Cinema 