1. L.A. Confidential. Directed Curtis Hanson revives Fifties noir in high style. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger wallow in the mire and betrayals. 2. Mrs. Brown. Was Queen Victoria hot for her manservant? Dame Judi Dench convinces in a model of film literacy. 3. Boogie Nights. Rootless Seventies…
Thursday December 25 Grate expectations: Face the facts–holidays are at least 80 percent about stuffing your face, and the more the merrier. Hanukkah frolickers can get their fill of potato pancakes at today’s Munchin’ Lots of Latkes Luncheon, a tribute to those crunchy, munchy, grated and fried traditional spud treats,…
If things had gone slightly differently on the night of December 22, 1989, the Denver Art Museum’s current show Old Masters Brought to Light: European Paintings From the National Museum of Art of Romania would never have happened. Because that night, as the iron grip of reviled Communist dictator Nicolae…
The violence that engulfed America shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy is well-documented. What isn’t as well known is that many churches responded to the unrest by pulling together in a unique and effective way. In order to heal the wounds of their…
Suppose you have a few million dollars to invest in The King and I. Naturally, you want to create a touring production of the highest quality, but you’re also concerned about turning a profit. What you need is some sort of guarantee that will eliminate the possibility of financial failure…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
For a high-school dropout with a bad temper, Quentin Tarantino has done pretty well for himself. Let’s see. In five years he’s grown into an ultra-hip icon with the fanatical following of a rock star and an entire school of imitators. He’s simultaneously brought Hollywood moguls to their knees and…
Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is about grief and the search for grace and the frail relationships between parents and children. It’s a profound and beautiful work, and if we had any doubts about the skill of this gifted filmmaker in the wake of Speaking Parts or Exotica, they vanish…
Thursday December 18 Material world: Well-worn baby blankets, christening gowns, Halloween costumes, patchwork quilts and wedding attire are the kinds of sentiment-charged mementos we stash in our attics for posterity. Cultural Threads: Ceremonial Textiles Around the World, a new exhibit opening today at the Mizel Museum of Judaica, 560 S…
The Colorado History Museum’s new exhibit on the 1960s and ’70s is filled with contradictions. It’s elegant in places, crude elsewhere; there are joyful moments and sad ones. And conveying these contradictions is exactly what the show’s principal organizer, Stan Oliner, had in mind. “As I looked at the period,…
No matter how hard playwright Eugene O’Neill tried to distance himself from his anguished past, the personal demons of his family life continued to hound the great writer until his death in 1953. He passed on his obsession to his widow, Carlotta, instructing her to refrain from producing his most…
The closing moments of CityStage Ensemble’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are ripe for a rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” After all, director Dan Hiester bills his production as ” Stoppard’s comedy with a holiday twist.” Given that no discernible holiday references appear elsewhere in the…
When the Titanic, the grandest ocean liner of her day, struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank to the bottom of the dead-calm, starlit North Atlantic, she launched a rich tangle of legends and lessons that endure to this day. You’ll find very few of…
It’s a tough act to follow, sweeping the Oscars with a hallowed epic about a redeemed Nazi who saves doomed Jews from the ovens. But Steven Spielberg, all grown up now and moving steadily forward, doesn’t disappoint. With Amistad, Hollywood’s master of narrative boldly plumbs some other heavyweight issues–the enduring…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fifty-some entries in thirty years–has presumably drawn to a close following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
Thursday December 11 Top of the season: A Christmas Carol–the Dickens classic replete with spooky ghosts, flashbacks and flash-forwards, an indefatigably cheery invalid and the original Scrooge of all Scrooges–has to be counted among the most essential of Christmas musts. So that you may fulfill your family holiday duty, Scrooge…
LoDo’s been a work in progress for a long time. Torn-up streets and sidewalks have been a neighborhood standard for the past decade–as have those many hooded parking meters around the ubiquitous construction zones. But nothing’s been worse than the situation that has confronted patrons of the CSK Gallery, which,…
Actor’s Studio founder and Broadway director Robert Lewis wrote in his memoirs about a 1931 exchange he had with a then-unknown Katharine Hepburn. Lewis was working for the legendary Group Theatre, an American ensemble that emulated the venerable Moscow Art Theatre by producing plays that preached august emotional truths and…
Plays about death understandably are not very popular. True, the occasional one does stimulate some thoughtful discussion among theatergoers. And when given national exposure, such as the kind Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box attained when Paul Newman directed a made-for-TV version of the drama several years ago, plays about death…
It’s been forty years since the New Wave came crashing down on the placid shore of traditional French filmmaking, but to the faithful, it was only yesterday. Students of the art cinematic and devotees of all things francais are heralding the rerelease of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 milestone Contempt as a…
The religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tim Blake Nelson’s Eye of God get pretty weighty and mighty dense in places–especially for an 84-minute movie set in the decaying little town of Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Unlike most of the 4,042 residents, Nelson is a graduate of Brown in classical studies and an…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
