Lost Embrace, by Argentinean director Daniel Burman, looks more like a handheld video by the purist Dogme school of Denmark. Centered in Buenos Aires, it’s an unevenly amusing comedy of family reconciliation that looks like a thumb in the eye and tastes of Europudding throughout. Ariel is a hangdog thirty-something…
The Woody Allen who wrote and directed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) back in 1972 was not yet the full-bloom, all-promises-delivered Woody who gave us Annie Hall and Manhattan — but at least he wasn’t the inert and seemingly dispirited moviemaker who…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its…
When was the last time you walked out of a theater feeling shell-shocked, saying to anyone who would listen (in language more profane): “Dude, that was some seriously messed-up stuff!” Not your garden-variety messed-up stuff, mind you, like in Saw. Not the messed-up revelations of political docs. We’re talking the…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than twenty years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
Filmmaker Rick Ray spent four months in India, where one-sixth of the earth’s people live, shooting his wide-ranging documentary, The Soul of India. Ray will introduce and discuss the new film in Boulder this week as part of the Macky Travel Film Series at the University of Colorado. Along with…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American Dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most discomfiting…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie,…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…
A spinoff of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days: as tepid sitcom, benign product and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of 2002’s charmingly lightweight hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for teardown. It’s…
In the big box-office months of December and January, Mike Nichols’s Closer was overwhelmed by the likes of The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby. Now comes a second chance to catch this boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing, adapted from a play by talented Brit misanthrope Patrick Marber. It…
Conversations in Clay. The ceramics exhibit at the Lakewood Cultural Center has been causing a lot of commotion ever since Lakewood City Manager Mike Rock ordered that part of a piece be removed for being “anti-American.” The piece that Rock and members of the Lakewood City Council had a problem…
BOCTOK. Steve Antonio is not a former Soviet artist, although his large paintings at Capsule, the gallery part of Pod, might make you think he is one, since these neo-pop compositions depict the first generation of Soviet cosmonauts. The little room at Capsule looks great and is perfectly filled by…
The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry’s is the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together; through her…
Damian Cunningham has the face of an angel — calm, cool blue eyes perched above freckled cheeks and a benevolent grin — which is only appropriate for a seven-year-old boy who speaks with the late, great saints, among them Peter, Joseph, Claire and, of course, Francis of Assisi. Damian sees…
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy will be released nationwide in both subtitled and dubbed versions. At the press screening, both were shown simultaneously in neighboring theaters, leaving reviewers to choose which one to see. This critic went with the subtitled cut, not purely for reasons of cinematic snobbery, but mostly because the…
The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, offered sufficient closure, so it didn’t exactly demand a sequel. The horror lay in wondering why a mysterious videotape kills viewers seven days after they watch it; to a lesser extent, there was the mystery of the creepy girl, face…
The heroine of Alain Corneau’s culture-clash comedy Fear and Trembling (2003) is a Japanese-born Belgian career girl, Amélie (the always-animated Sylvie Testud), who pursues her goal of becoming “a real Japanese” by submitting to a series of hideous chores — including endless photolcopying and bathroom work — even though she’s…
BOCTOK. Steve Antonio is not a former Soviet artist, although his large paintings at Capsule, the gallery part of Pod, might make you think he is one, since these neo-pop compositions depict the first generation of Soviet cosmonauts. The little room at Capsule looks great and is perfectly filled by…
The chilling oddity of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is not limited to the fact that it is the first mainstream German film to grapple with Adolf Hitler — six decades after his death. Set, for the most part, in the underground Berlin bunker where the Nazi dictator spent his last days,…
