When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee’s four-part doc, easily the best non-fiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and displeased,…
The actress Viola Davis has carved, handsome features and a tenacious stare that brooks no inattention. Though Davis’s implacable integrity has, for the most part, saved her from the hooker-in-the-hood roles that confine so many black actresses, she has yet to climb out of the prison of dignified maids and…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali…um…the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video: The man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout, is dispiriting. This is an actor coming off a…
Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois’s police procedural owes more to Prime Suspect and Hill Street Blues than it does to any film genre. And Le Petit Lieutenant is all the better for it, if you can withstand 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…
Talladega Nights (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements, and gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well…
Denver-bred filmmaker Kim Roberts describes the maiden theatrical run of Wilderness Survival for Girls, which can be seen this week at Starz FilmCenter, as “a really risky venture.” That’s appropriate, since the movie, which she wrote and directed with her husband, Eli Despres, was a gamble from the beginning –…
“T.I.A.,” mutters Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), slouched across a bar in Sierra Leone. It is 1999. As the West obsesses over Clinton’s blow job, the West African nation is mired in a savage civil war. Our hero, a world-weary soldier of fortune, has struck up a conversation with Maddy Bowen…
From its wink-wink, nudge-nudge movie-within-a-movie opening to its bold-faced quoting of such classic Hollywood farces as The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday, Nancy Meyerss The Holiday wants us to know that its different from the kind of romantic-comedy pabulum that fills the multiplexes these days. And it is different;…
Apocalypto has a faux-Greek title and an opening quote from historian Will Durant that ruminates on the decline of imperial Rome. It may seem an odd way to comment on the supposed end of an imaginary, unspeakably barbaric Mayan civilization — but WWJD? Mel Gibson means to be universal. Not…
Deep in the outskirts of industrial Los Angeles, an unnamed Actor (Morgan Freeman) wonders if the time has come to break a four-year hiatus of doubt and indecision and get back in the game. Not that his destination, the set of a tiny indie by “a director so young he…
Sorry to harsh your buzz, but that four-dollar latte purchase of yours often yields little or almost nothing for the African bean harvesters who made it possible. No mere Western guilt-inducing harangue, Black Gold is a highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis. Its calmly accumulated details…
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…
No, the Virgin Mary doesn’t get high on aerosol fumes, and Joseph doesn’t ride in on a skateboard, but in most other respects, The Nativity Story is less of a departure for Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown director Catherine Hardwicke than you might imagine. From the first glimpse of Nazareth…
Do artists actually see more than ordinary people? That’s what my high-school art teacher thought. So, apparently, does Nicole Kidman — or at least that’s the way she plays Diane Arbus (1923-71) in the celebrated photographer’s exceedingly curious “imaginary portrait,” Fur. Kidman acted around a prosthetic proboscis to win an…
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…
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (Warner Bros.) At long last, Richard Donner’s much-whispered-about “original version” of Superman II sees the light of day, and it quickly joins the ranks of the reconstructed Touch of Evil, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner as films made superior in the recutting and retelling…
Okay, so Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott were asking for it by naming their latest mega-production Déjà Vu. These dudes aren’t exactly paragons of innovation, unless taking rhetorical hysteria to awesome new heights counts. As the opening credits roll — by which of course I mean roll, zip, flicker, fade,…
The first few minutes of Tenacious D in “The Pick of Destiny” are something to behold: a four-minute rock opera cranked to eleven. A doughy young boy with dirty-mop locks (Nacho Libre’s Troy Gentile, once more playing li’l Jack Black) laments his tragic plight: He’s stuck in Kickapoo with “a…
Solemn, flashy and flabbergasting, The Fountain — adapted by Darren Aronofsky from his own graphic novel — should really be called “The Shpritz.” The premise is lachrymose, the sets are clammy and the metaphysics all wet. The screen is awash in spiraling nebulae and misty points of light, with the…
For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is — an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters…
The nifty premise of Unknown owes a large debt of gratitude to the twin brain-teasers Memento and The Usual Suspects, but first-time screenwriter Matthew Waynee and music-video/commercial director Simon Brand will need a tad more experience before achieving the atmospheric intensity or narrative dexterity of those two films. Five battered…
