Siren. Icon. Muse. You can apply any or all of those labels to Catherine Deneuve, but trying to make any one of them stick is trickier than lighting a match in a rainstorm. Ask her about her five-decade career in movies, and she will pointedly deny ever thinking in terms…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first fifteen minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted…
To brand, then dismiss, Four Christmases as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit — never, for a second, did this New Line Cinema cast-off scream or even whisper decent in the run-up to its opening. The story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) —…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully, there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed firmly…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…
Back in 2005, Dorothy Stang died thousands of miles away, in the Amazon jungle where the 73-year-old nun had spent decades trying to help poor settlers and save the Brazilian rainforest. But her story hit home with local filmmakers Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher, who followed Denver resident David Stang…
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Well, who wouldn’t in this economy, even if the currency in question is rupees and winning the loot means being pegged as a fraud, getting a firsthand education in “enhanced” interrogation methods and having to relive some of the most painful moments of your…
Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a wistfully amused friend in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, or that she played Plum Berkeley on Absolutely Fabulous. Thomas has mischief in…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia With…
If you traveled the length of John Malkovich’s medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett’s Krapp recorded his last tape and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
We’re pretty spoiled here in the metro area when it comes to film and film festivals. That goes double for all you adrenaline junkies and nature lovers out there who live mere minutes from the Adventure Film Festival, a fest homegrown out of Boulder that showcases dozens of independent films…
If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic, but the comedian,…
Movie cults are born, not made. A youthful audience discovered Donnie Darko on its own, even as another demographic transformed The Sound of Music into sing-along karaoke — to name two of the 21st century’s most notorious cult attractions. Still, no less than rocket science, show business relies on tested…
Paul Rudd wears a constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him. He’s frat-boy handsome and therefore almost anonymous when he stands in a movie-star lineup; in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2003), Rudd received a supposedly extreme…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
The protag of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a modestly gaudy people’s heroine industriously repairing the social world, one frayed interaction at a time. After extended cameos in two previous Leigh films (as a resourceful pop tart in All or Nothing and the date-raped rich girl in Vera Drake), fine-boned Sally…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize that their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words,…
On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezerish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case…
The immense popularity of villain Freddy Krueger and the flood of ever-sillier sequels have obscured the fact that the original Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the scariest and best horror movies ever made. Besides its status as one of the most successful and iconic horror films of the…
