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Portland Latin American Film Festival

Viva Villa! Viva accordions!

Movie Reviews & Stories Chicogrande 38 [MEXICO] The 41st film of 74-year-old Mexican auteur Felipe Cazals is a deeply silly western loosely inspired... More

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 WW Screen Staff

The Big Year

Who watches the birdwatchers?

Movie Reviews & Stories The existence of The Big Year is a sign of something diseased and possibly irreparable in our society. Watching it I felt, for the first time this month, a distinct urge to occupy something. This i More

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 AARON MESH

The Weird World of Blowfly

The dirty old man in winter.

Movie Reviews & Stories In contemplating Clarence Reid’s career touring the world as septuagenarian soul singer/rap inventor/pussy lover Blowfly, it’s hard not to think of a tired old circus lion. Occasionally he roars More

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 CASEY JARMAN

Reel Music 26, Week 2

Have you heard of this “Decemberists” band?

Movie Reviews & Stories A Star Is Born 35 A Star is Born is like a Serbian episode of MTV’s Made. Vanja Kovacevic, who wrote, directed, edited and produced this documentary, wants to become a drummer. The Decemberists ar More

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 WW Screen Staff

Exquisite Corpse

Gus Van Sant’s Restless is a love story with carrion beetles.

Movie Reviews & Stories It is not uncommon for a great artist to show questionable taste in source material. Bob Dylan recorded a Christmas album in which he gurgled “Here Comes Santa Claus.” T.S. Eliot developed a poe More

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 AARON MESH

The Ides of March

Ryan Gosling is an honorable man.

Movie Reviews & Stories If politics is the art of the possible, art about politics is an inventory of the most appalling possibilities. The taint of compromise—the incremental moral-compass adjustments that have despoile More

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 AARON MESH

Real Steel

The prizefighter and the robot.

Movie Reviews & Stories Real Steel is fundamentally a bad movie—obnoxious, incoherent and sloppy—resembling nothing so much as some ’90s summer family-film commodity fabricated to sell toys: Rock ’Em Sock
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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 AARON MESH

Reel Music 26

Texans fiddle while Cab burns.

Movie Reviews & Stories Cab Calloway: Sketches 60 Few musicians whom I grew up worshipping stand taller and prouder in my memory than Cab Calloway. With his big band swing-blues, his unconventional dance moves and his ree More

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 CASEY JARMAN

Love Sometimes Fails

This year’s PLGFF is a festival of missed connections.

Movie Reviews & Stories The 15th annual Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival starts on a poignant note this weekend—the fest’s best films are about...
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011 AARON MESH, MAGGIE SUMMERS

50/50

The 27-year-old cancer patient.

Movie Reviews & Stories The best scene in cancer comedy 50/50 is wordless: Newly diagnosed with a malignant nerve sheath sarcoma, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders the halls of a Seattle oncology ward stoned out of his gourd. More

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 AARON MESH

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