The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco’s most famous landmark — and possibly the country’s — makes a lovely place to die. Only a four-foot safety rail separates pedestrians from a 220-foot plunge; climb that, and it’s just a four-second drop to eternity. Factor in its beauty and symbolic value –…
Nine-year-old Schlomo, the focus of Live and Become, the opening film of the 11th Mellon Financial Denver Jewish Film Festival, has every right to let out a big, exasperated “Oy vey!” The fact that he’s part of Operation Moses, the clandestine and debilitating mid-1980s resettlement of thousands of famine-starved Ethiopian…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
The Science of Sleep (Warner Bros.) Feature films are to video directors what sitcoms are to stand-up comedians, and for every David Fincher and Seinfeld, there are dozens of artists who should have stayed in the field they know best. Michel Gondry, who made his name directing fantastic videos for…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore romantic comedy Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael…
PARK CITY, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be nice…
PARK CITY, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…
Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance documentaries Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the non-fiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur and global warming, this critic was nearly moved to rescind…
PARK CITY, Utah –On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Catch a Fire (Focus) In his commentary for the underrated, undervalued Catch a Fire, director Phillip Noyce discusses the inspiration: witnessing the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. He wanted to comprehend “the terrorist’s mind,” so he found a story that accomplishes such a difficult thing: the…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity…
New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wannabe with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool, and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Fresh out of the joint with a heroin habit at bay, Sherrybaby’s bottle-blond Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) swoops down on the young daughter she left behind, who’s being cared for by Sherry’s brother and his wife. In her hapless efforts to become a reformed mother, Sherry all but swallows the…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan¹s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-twentieth-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men — husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats — are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s bestseller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private-eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for maximum chiaroscuro…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about…
