Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Set in the white, lower-class, upstate New York dead end of Mohawk Valley, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country follows four generations of Moshers from one October 31st to the next, and, in between days of the dead, the spooks linger. Halloween itself is a Mosher obsession, a leveler…
Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: A Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an eleven-year-old girl watches her mother get shot. It’s the first sign that here is a film that won’t content itself with just charting the little measures…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
A quintet of pathetic pals are sized up in 44 Inch Chest, an often sharp, nasty exposé of masculinity written by Sexy Beast scripters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, reuniting them with that film’s Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Married for 21 years, Colin (Winstone) is told by wife Liz…
All that remains of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day is Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance, his baddest and best. The rest of the movie? A blustering stumble toward parody — an overwrought, operatic buddy-cop flip-flop also starring Ethan Hawke as the rookie put to the test again and again by the devil…
Now a 305-minute triptych film, Red Riding originated in the novels of Ossett-bred David Peace, written in Tokyo and published 1999-2002. Looking back without nostalgia to the Yorkshire of his youth, the books summoned what Brit critic Simon Reynolds once called the “sheer crapness of England in the late ’70s,”…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
It’s a telling detail that indie film’s premier misanthrope, Neil LaBute, has an executive-producer credit on writer-director Lee Toland Krieger’s scathing dysfunctional-clan dramedy, The Vicious Kind. Meet small-town Connecticut construction worker Caleb Sinclaire (Adam Scott, blistering), a sleep-deprived misogynist who maliciously projects his bitterness and insecurities on anyone foolish enough…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” of black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swaggering stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith (who notably didn’t write the Cop Out script; this is the Clerks auteur’s…
Katie Jarvis, who makes her acting debut as a rabid teenager in writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, was discovered on an English railway station platform, yelling at her boyfriend. Whether Jarvis is a natural-born actress or simply playing herself as Mia, a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old child of the Essex projects with…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Already a blogosphere punching bag for right-wing Christians, Creation — about Charles Darwin’s writing of On the Origin of Species — commits the sin of thoughtfulness, and is quite moving in the process. Director Jon Amiel, working from a screenplay by John Collee, injects flashes of artsy craftsmanship (time-lapse photography depicting…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
Because they’re crafted outside the Hollywood system, you might assume that this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts stand in sharp defiance to conventional mainstream cinema. But the best of these ten entries are, in some ways, the most familiar — their most radical element being that they operate in…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Slight, indifferently shot and entirely lacking in ballast, Harmony and Me’s sole justification for being is that it’s consistently very funny. Harmony (Justin Rice) has a life full of (ha!) discord; obsessing over his ex, Jessica (Kristen Tucker), he floats through a boring tech job, takes piano lessons and generally…
Detective stories imply that mysteries can be solved, or at least rationally explained. Even the most debased example confirms a universe in which guilt is determined and the guilty accorded just deserts. Such are the underpinnings of Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s remarkably self-effacing and highly intelligent comedy Police, Adjective —…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra: “Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same well…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Opening with balalaikas, scurrying agrarians in collarless shirts and helpful intertitles announcing that Tolstoy was “the most celebrated writer in the world,” The Last Station threatens at first to be Tolstoy for Dummies as interpreted by Monty Python. Soon enough, though, this workmanlike adaptation of Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s…
As personal assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in transatlantic manners, From Paris With Love,…
