The anguished paintings of Edvard Munch, who was born in 1863, foreshadowed expressionism and provided uneasy visual correlatives to the horror and loneliness of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t until 1974 — three decades after the Norwegian painter’s death — that a filmmaker captured the spirit of Munch’s work…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection (Universal Studios) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14-film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive’ as the box claims — missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant…
Full and PLANNING.ABSTRACT. Denver painter Bruce Price is clearly Colorado’s preeminent post-minimalist, as proved by the recent batch of fabulous creations in FULL: New Paintings by Bruce Price. These paintings, though clearly a continuation of Price’s past efforts, are also completely new-looking and very different conceptually. A protegé of the…
Ah, Wallace and Gromit. Who doesn’t get a little lift at the sound of those names? Who doesn’t feel the edges of her mouth begin to tickle toward a smile, her heart grow warmer with images of the love between a (plasticine) man and his (plasticine) dog? Perhaps you’re not…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed with the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad…
All the publicity for Waiting… has focused on the scene in which an annoying customer at the fictional chain restaurant ShenaniganZ sends her food back to the kitchen, where it meets with all sorts of nasty modifications, courtesy of some dandruff, pubic hair and mucus. The teaser posters depicted similarly…
One of the strongest — and sure to be controversial — films of the year, The War Within goes places that other films wouldn’t dare go. Thoughtfully written and nicely acted, it follows an Islamic suicide bomber who comes to New York City with a deadly plan. The film in…
Two years before he stunned the film world with 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Conformist, a deeply unsettling portrait of a Fascist secret policeman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who represses his true urges — social and sexual — in a cowardly attempt to embrace the dangerous ideological…
Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle. The thing’s stunning to look at, and frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but Oliver Twist,…
About once a year — twice, if we’re lucky — a first-time director shows up with something original, electrifying and humane, a film that shows us a new way to see, that presents complex and memorable people in whom we recognize ourselves. Last year it was Joshua Marston and Maria…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…
To the knowledgeable comic-book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who aren’t…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
More than a decade before post-war revolutionists such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the other enfants terribles of the New Wave forever transformed French cinema, that country’s film industry endured the peculiar trauma of German occupation. Between 1940 and 1944, the Nazis purged French moviemaking of Jews and Communists,…
Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) ABC’s juggernaut drama is made up mostly of elements that have trickled down from HBO: black humor, self-awareness, the radical notion that women over thirty can arouse the national libido. The bonus deleted scenes don’t add much to the story, and behind-the-scenes…
A Visual Voice. Though not a full-blown retrospective, A Visual Voice: The Language of Herbert Bayer is a significant exhibit. Bayer, one of one of the most important artists who ever lived and worked in the state, was first a student and then a master at the Bauhaus, the early-twentieth-century…
