Early in Betty Blue, aspiring novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) declares, “She was like a flower with translucent antennae and a mauve plastic heart” in so solemn a tone that it practically dares the viewer to laugh. And so it goes throughout this divisively fleshy 1986 opus. Betty (Béatrice Dalle), who…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore…
Denver Artists Guild Founders. The history of the Denver Artists Guild — an early 20th-century group —- is little known, but it’s been documented in this show. The exhibit was organized by collectors Deborah Wadsworth and Cynthia Jennings, with a design by Steve Savageau. Wadsworth and Jennings identified 52 artists…
At first glance, Somers Town seems gritty and realistic, what with its handheld, black-and-white shots of working-class London and a cast dominated by actors who wouldn’t look glamorous even after a twelve-hour session with Paul Mitchell. But the film is shot through with a deep streak of whimsy that infuses…
The aliens have been with us for twenty years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside-down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The…
Childsplay. For this show, the floor of Walker Fine Art has been covered with rough-hewn playground equipment made of wood and bronze. And despite the show’s title, all of it has been made for, and scaled to, adults, who are meant to interact with the individual pieces. The mostly kinetic…
The cult that’s assembled around 2001’s Donnie Darko, which gets the Film on the Rocks treatment on Wednesday, August 12, seems motivated more by the size of writer/director Richard Kelly’s ambitions than by the goals he actually achieves. Simply put, the story of a troubled teen (Jake Gyllenhaal during his…
It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies — which is to say, there’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia. But since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia (Fred Zinnemann’s penultimate feature in 1977), perhaps it was merely necessary to…
In the Loop doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the know. In Armando Iannucci’s movie, a satire of the run-up to war with a Middle Eastern country, it means that all the poor bastards are stuck in a loop, making the same bad decisions and tragic mistakes over and over again…
Charles Parson. This must-see sculpture solo titled Charles Parson: Personal Echoes on the Horizon, at Golden’s Foothills Art Center, begins out front with a trio of hieratically composed tubular metal sculptures — basically gongs. The viewer/participant is meant to strike the gongs with clappers that are chained to them. This…
The opening frames of Pressure Cooker, a documentary debuting at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, July 31, serve the same sort of dish as Hell’s Kitchen, Fox TV’s restaurant survival test. Wilma Stephenson, a culinary-arts teacher at Frankford High School in inner-city Philadelphia, is seen barking at her cooking students like…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with…
An afternoon breeze blows through an open doorway under the opening titles of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, portending a coming storm and the more violent winds of change about to uproot the lives of the movie’s characters. A bottled message cast from the shores of an economy whose implosion anticipated…
Charles Parson. This must-see sculpture solo titled Charles Parson: Personal Echoes on the Horizon, at Golden’s Foothills Art Center, begins out front with a trio of hieratically composed tubular metal sculptures — basically gongs. The viewer/participant is meant to strike the gongs with clappers that are chained to them. This…
Being a young actress in Hollywood can be a horror show even for performers who achieve something akin to stardom – a condition that’s temporary for all too many of them. Consider the case of Mischa Barton. She was a sizzling property in 2003 upon the arrival of The O.C.,…
In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets, and takes along on the first date a ten-point checklist…
A small mob of camels stampedes by a nomad’s tent, with something that might once have been a tractor eating the kicked-up dust. Inside, a young guy in a sailor suit sits on the rug, cheerfully recounting his death struggle with an octopus to the impassive middle-aged couple he’s hoping…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
The astronaut drama Countdown is a curio from both a historical and filmic standpoint. The movie, co-starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, both pre-Godfather, arrived in 1968, a year before the initial moon landing, but at a point when it was clear the United States was on the verge of…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
Jennifer Lynch — like Sofia Coppola on occasion — has been tarred with the unfounded claim that her films get made only because of who her father is. David Lynch serves as executive producer of Surveillance, Jennifer’s first film since the near-stoning she received after her 1993 debut feature, the…
