The impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes — not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically ask: compared to what? Very well. Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
If you’re a regular movie-goer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
The Darwinian theory that shlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel, The Celestine Prophecy, has been a bulwark of new-age metaphysics since it first hit the bestseller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in print,…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show — preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L¹Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
If you’re craving an antidote to the sanctity of repressed gay cowboys, you could do worse than Adam & Steve. This good-natured comedy from writer-director Craig Chester uses gently sly wit to poke fun at neurotic gay singles, coming of age in the 1980s and dating in the era of…
The second Central and East European Film Festival gets under way on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus Monday, April 24, with a program called “Reading Between the Lines: Subversive Films Banned Under Repressive Regimes,” with screenings of Milos Forman’s classic 1967 satire from Czechoslovakia, The Fireman’s Ball, and Juliusz…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
Americano (MTI) Before he is due to take a high-powered corporate job, college graduate Chris (Joshua Jackson) heads off with two friends (Timm Sharp and Ruthanna Hopper) to Europe, where they end up in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. There, he encounters one of those saucy Latinas (Blade…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer-director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely and Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women, but with wildly different results: Virtually…
Countless are the creative souls who struggled with mental illness, as are the novels and films dedicated to them. Again and again, we’ve encountered artists both inspired and undermined by their madness, whose torment and tumult produce works of beauty and depth. So can a documentary about a singer-songwriter and…
Perhaps it’s just the inner drama geek talking, but there’s something extremely compelling about seeing hardened felons preparing to put on a classic play with the enthusiasm of giddy schoolgirls. Like many of us, these violent men undoubtedly considered Shakespeare highbrow and stuffy in the outside world, but in attempting…
Believe it or not, The Benchwarmers is so lame that it can’t even lay claim to being the best Adam Sandler-produced movie not screened for critics in 2006; that dubious honor would go to Grandma’s Boy, which was by no means good, but at least featured a kung-fu chimp and…
Tired of the same old multiplex? Last Friday, the Harkins Northfield 18 at Stapleton opened for business, offering Denver movie-goers the largest single screen in the state and a sound system that rivals the most muscled-up rock-concert venue. The centerpiece of the new eighteen-theater house is something called the Cine…
