Arts & Life

The British seem to have an inexhaustible supply of bloody royals and old castles to exploit, and Americans at least have an appetite to match. In just the last couple of months, The Favourite brought us a grim and intimate view of the 18th century Queen Anne, and now comes a grim and intimate view from the 16th century, of Mary (Saoirse Ronan) in Scotland and Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie) in England.

It’s interesting how a movie can be both awful and touching at the same time. Green Book pulls off that oxymoronic trick. The film’s a lame civil rights drama; a repeat of the already lame Driving Miss Daisy. It bogs down in terrible, aged white clichés about race and culture, and some of its moves are so obvious, contrived and simply stiff that your eyes roll, and you cringe as the obvious staggers across the screen.

Adam McKay, the writer and director of Vice, has collaborated with Will Ferrell on Anchorman, Talladega Nights and The Other Guys, so you figure that he’s got a fair amount of funny cynicism in him. But maybe not so much cynicism as McKay shows in Vice, a story about the former vice president to George W. Bush, Dick Chaney. McKay also has a goodly amount of contempt in him, for a man he clearly finds quite contemptible, with one very deeply felt exception.

For generations, the siren song of deep powder and steep inclines has lured starry-eyed young people into the time-honored tradition of "ski bumming."

The phrase is as much a term of endearment as an aspiration to a life lived simply: Pick a mountain, find some roommates, and ski or snowboard as much as humanly possible. But decades of corporate mergers and tourism are turning once-scrappy ski towns into high-end resorts, leaving the alluring glow of ski bum life to grow dim in much of the Mountain West.

Polish-born filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw in 1967. When he was 14, his mother took him to London and to exile from Poland. He studied at Oxford, became a filmmaker in England, and in 2013 moved back to Poland to make the Oscar-winning Ida, about a young Polish girl in the early 1960s who is about to become a nun when she learns that she was born Jewish and her parents had been murdered during the war. There’s a hint of autobiography in Ida, because Pawlikowski himself learned in his teens that his grandmother was Jewish and had been murdered at Auschwitz by the Nazis.