In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo before her…
Berghaus, Douglas and Riverhouse Press. In the front spaces at Sandy Carson, there’s a whimsical yet intelligent show called Clearing: The Kinetic Sculpture of Marc Berghaus. The pieces are mechanical, with the most clever use of machinery being “Freeway Chase,” in which viewers look through the frame of a TV…
While digging in the mud of a Kansas river bank, a group of scientists discovers…bones! Whose bones are they? Where did they come from? And what are they doing in this unlikely spot? All of those questions are answered in the latest film to hit the Extreme Screen Theater at…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show?…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and surprisingly robust indie box office…
Watching Marilyn Monroe in Cinemascope, a critic once wrote, is “like being smothered in baked Alaska.” Reading that as a teenager raised some thrilling questions: Is that good or bad? What is “baked Alaska”? And then a realization: How singular it must be for a woman — or a filmmaker…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with a novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
Inspiring Impressionism. This is hardly your run-of-the-mill effort in which a cavalcade of big-name European artists are represented by minor works. Instead, it’s an intellectually stimulating exhibit crowded with iconic pieces by some of the most significant artists who ever took brush to canvas. Curated by the DAM’s Timothy Standring…
Fade in. Three twelve-year-old Mississippi boys find themselves enraptured by the 1981 Lucas/Spielberg classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s summer, and they’ve yet to discover girls. Or maybe it’s the girls who have yet to do the discovering. The guys rent a video camera and enlist anyone willing to…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…
If the great movie musicals of yesteryear put a song in your heart, Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs leaves you with a funny taste in your mouth. How else to describe Honoré’s orally fixated post-postmodern operetta, whose libretto includes lyrics like “Keep your saliva as an antidote/Let it trickle like sweet…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long, and going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
For pure cinema, nothing rivals a high-stakes, full-tilt poker game — unless it’s somebody landing on Ventnor Avenue with two houses, or sending an opponent to the backgammon bar with double threes, or laying down a four with a bloodcurdling cry of “Uno!” Add poker to the long list of…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
For those growing up in weatherbeaten West Texas, someone notes early in Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen, “nature becomes God.” A God that hands out abundance at times, to be sure, but also one who snatches away crops, farms and livelihoods in a single wrathful whirlwind. To master one’s plot of…
George Carlson. Put together by curator Ann Daley, who has shaped and defined the Western collection at the Denver Art Museum, George Carlson: Heart of the West deals with the career of an accomplished neo-traditional artist who looks to the century-old Impressionist style for inspiration. The Carlson exhibit includes nearly…
Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” — note not even a question mark at the end — you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the post-pubescent variety are…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese: his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in mid-song aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than his…
With ski season winding down, there seem to be fewer and fewer reasons to load up the car, buckle in and head for the high country and a weekend of scenery and excitement. But forget snow: This week, the Vail Film Festival is the only reason you need to spend…
