Triple Your Pleasure

Behold a tale of true love (between a boy and a bicycle), of tireless courage (from a bitty grandmother with a clubfoot) and of a very shocking new definition of “sexy” (three wizened matriarchs who ravenously slurp down frogs). This is The Triplets of Belleville, an animated extravaganza of Gallic…

Flick Pick

The great silent comedian Charles Chaplin’s political troubles with the United States government probably didn’t begin with the release of Modern Times in 1936. But this brilliant satire of American factory automation, the depersonalization of workers and the social ills of the Depression got a cold reception in the U.S…

Stone Cold

Some acts of courage command everyone’s respect: the firefighter’s return to a burning house to rescue a child, the infantryman’s sacrifice of self for a wounded comrade, the weary black woman’s refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus. Sometimes, though, courage can feel clouded — especially when it’s…

Dude, Where’s My Temporal Orientation?

There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real, like the original punk or goth movements or Australia’s…

Flick Pick

The new film by Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi (who gave us the superb tale of mountain smuggling and pursuit A Time for Drunken Horses) has a most provocative title — Marooned in Iraq — and addresses a crucial contemporary subject: the slaughter of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s regime and…

Painting by Numbers

So, have you ever wondered what exactly goes into the painting of a portrait? You may have suspected there was more to it than a painter saying something along the lines of, “Hey baby, can I, uh, paint you?” and then someone else saying, “Yeah, sure, that’d be cool.” You…

Feeling Blue

Furtive anonymous sex and deep psychological insight don’t usually accompany one another — except in the writings of John Rechy and Irving Rosenthal. But they most certainly do in Porn Theatre, writer-director-actor Jacques Nolot’s uncannily subtle mood piece, helpfully retitled from the French original, La Chatte à Deux Têtes. That’s…

Flick Pick

The first film in a new monthly series called Seeing Queerly, presented by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of Colorado, will be No Secret Anymore — The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon. Directed by Joan E. Biren, the 57-minute documentary chronicles half a century of…

Caine Unable

Michael Caine is a revelation!” declares the Jeffrey Lyons quote currently appearing on ads for The Statement. Lyons is right, but not in the way you might expect. Indeed, Caine’s performance here is revelatory — who knew he could be this boring? Insufferable, yes — Oscar aside, his mangled “American”…

Adios, Hugo

In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing…

Flick Pick

Be careful what you defrost this week. It might be Aunt Harriet’s scary Christmas fruitcake, buried in the depths of the freezer compartment since 1997. Or that leg of lamb you neglected to roast in ’93. Worse yet, it could be the gruesome alien predator that, once accidentally thawed, terrified…

The Full… Mindy?

This year’s British assault on the Yank funnybone is a spirited, hard-trying farce called Calendar Girls, plucked straight from 1999 headlines and dolled up with all the heartwarming charm we’ve come to expect from recent films made by our former rulers. Essentially a chick flick for middle-aged women — nothing…

Flick Pick

King Vidor’s great silent classic The Crowd (1928) holds up astonishingly well 75 years after it first played in theaters, and knowledgeable film lovers leap at any opportunity to see it — especially if that opportunity comes complete with live piano accompaniment, as in days of yore. The Crowd will…

A Mountainous Achievement

Anthony Minghella’s magnificent film version of the Civil War epic Cold Mountain has much more going for it than Hollywood grandeur. Beyond its striking sets and gruesome battle scenes populated with thousands of extras, in addition to its movie-star glamour — Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are like lovely pieces…

Homeland Insecurity

For those who pay no mind to Oprah, the dispute at the heart of House of Sand and Fog concerns the occupancy of a run-down little bungalow just inland from the Northern California coast. It’s not much of a place, really. And to get a glimpse of the Pacific, you’d…

Flick Pick

At first glance, it seems odd that French surrealist filmmaker Georges Franju began as a documentarian. But his non-fiction visit to a slaughterhouse (Le Sang des Betes, 1949) and his grim look at World War I relics (Hotel des Invalides, 1951) set the stage, in their way, for his later…

Lotsa Luck

William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…

Au Revoir

Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie/film-fest crowd into enemy camps. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and dead-eye…

Upper Middle Earth

You know how it’s often the ones we love whose flaws are most apparent? Well, when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I am smitten. This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It…

Flick Pick

The third Longmont Film Festival gets under way Thursday, December 18, with Ernst Lubitsch’s heartwarming 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner and continues through Saturday, December 20, with Billy Wilder’s favorite Some Like It Hot (recently acclaimed by the American Film Institute as the best Hollywood comedy ever made),…

Rage Against the Machine

On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took eleven passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…

Land of Opportunity

Sorrow sprouts wings and flies in Jim Sheridan’s radiant new film In America, which pits the pain and grief of unimaginable loss against the resilience of the human heart. In this semi-autobiographical tale from the writer-director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, a working-class Irish…