Despite the sunshine of the Stalin years and the carefree frolic of the oligarchs, the words “Russia” and “romantic comedy” don’t exactly come tripping off the tongue in perfect harmony. But if we can believe co-directors Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky, a welcome spirit of playfulness — or the brave…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty, which became a hit…
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it’s acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for children. A poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect and abandonment — all the more disturbing for being based on a true incident — this Japanese film is the…
The Pacifier, starring human battering ram Vin Diesel as a Navy S.E.A.L. ordered to protect five kids from baddies out to steal their dead dad’s invention, was written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, two members of the defunct MTV comedy troupe The State. Lennon, however, is best known…
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now: that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn’t come out so early in the year and been forgotten by those…
While Jonathan Caouette’s extraordinary documentary Tarnation has given hope to aspiring directors (famously, it was initially shot and edited on a Macintosh for a couple hundred dollars), what has startled film-festival audiences across the country is not so much the method, but the madness: A mélange of old home movies…
CPAC MEMBER AWARDS. Every year the Colorado Photographic Arts Center brings in guest jurors to select one member for a Project Grant and two others for Personal Visions Awards. The three are then brought together in the CPAC MEMBER AWARDS exhibition, which is currently on display. Though this may sound…
Give Dan Harris, the writer-director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor…
It’s not easy to pull off a good morality tale. Too often, movies with a message, or about a movement, reduce characters and events to type. They pit unqualified good against unqualified evil — a dark-narrative temptation — and, like so much of what issues from Hollywood, do so to…
Thanks to the talky self-absorption of everyone from sleek Julia Roberts to slovenly Michael Moore, the Academy Awards broadcast is always too long by half. For the short of it, why not open the package called Oscar Shorts 2005, on view this week at Starz? The three Oscar-nominated animated films…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between netherworlds and a real world used as a battleground, breeding ground and playground for higher beings amused and appalled…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a twelve-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at because…
A cynic might describe movies as the most depraved and fantastic system of exploitation ever devised. After all, they trade on the greed and hubris of the financiers, the beauty and allure of the stars and the trust (or, if you prefer, gullibility) of the audience. No one involved in…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere but Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sob-fest The Joy Luck Club. Then, in…
Movie cultists, rejoice. An eight-week-long Friday-night series called “Reel Late With Keith Garcia” opens Friday, February 18, with Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Chris Columbus’s debut comedy follows a teenage babysitter (Elisabeth Shue) who takes two kids with her to downtown Chicago to help get a friend out of a jam…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
Bride and Prejudice is the third major American film in the past few years to fuse the epic romantic musical stylings of Indian “Bollywood” movies with more Westernized, “Hollywood” elements. It’s also the most successful of them, but when the only significant competition has been The Guru and Bollywood/Hollywood, that…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
If you want to know what Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is all about, it’s pretty easy to sum up. It starts with a big fight, as a group of local villagers plays capture the flag in the branches of a large tree. Then there’s a brief stretch of plot, as…
The White House and the Pentagon don’t find the French very funny these days, but you might. The Denver Film Society’s five-week Comédies à la Française series begins Wednesday, February 9, with Cedric Klapisch’s rollicking sex farce L’Auberge Espagnole (2003), in which seven coeds living in a Barcelona apartment confound…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
