What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly thirty pounds in thirty days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan/chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to…
If even one of the major networks had a successful sitcom in the vein of Friends but with an all-black cast, movies like Breakin’ All the Rules would have no reason to exist. Part of an ever-expanding subgenre that includes The Brothers, Two Can Play That Game and Deliver Us…
Tim Burton’s fantasy of alienation and acceptance, Edward Scissorhands (1990), is almost as haunting as it is romantic — a cunning mixture of charm and fright that shows us a soul in torment. The gentle title character, played by a young Johnny Depp, is the creation of a Frankenstein-like inventor…
Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Art From the Logan Collection. The normal stock in trade for the Denver Art Museum’s Asian-art curator, Ron Otsuka, is traditional styles, but he’s been drafted into doing contemporary duty by a gift that includes more than a score of pieces by Asian and Asian-American artists…
We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could just as well be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, non-stop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue –…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, a lot of observant American movie-goers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it certainly…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and pre-pubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) puts a hip ’90s spin on the lovers-on-the-run formula perfected early on by Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and, three decades later, by Bonnie and Clyde. Written by ace smart-aleck Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), it stars Christian Slater as a movie-crazed geek named Clarence,…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself), a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the…
Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants. Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Pour a couple of Old-Fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
The strangest and most obsessive of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Vertigo has fascinated assorted movie buffs, philosophers and psychiatric professionals since its release in 1958 — not least because this tangled tale about an acrophobic ex-detective on the trail of an old friend’s beautiful wife suggests that reinventing a living woman…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort. Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star, a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this…
One of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men will be the centerpiece of four film screenings and a lecture this weekend at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Cary Grant Film Festival begins on Friday evening, April 23, and will be highlighted by the Nancy Nelson Masterpiece Lecture at 6…
Hidden Images. On the mezzanine of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Hidden Images, which is dedicated to recent work by major contemporary Czech artist Adéla Matasová. The show is made up of a handful of things, including a group of conceptual installations that reconcile minimalism to movement. Three of…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior-high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in a…
