Before you crack your wallet for Veronica Guerin, you’d be well off to rent a video of the 2000 release When the Sky Falls (working titles: When Heaven Falls and, natch, Veronica Guerin), of which this new Veronica Guerin is basically a tarted-up remake. Same story, same scenarios, same basic…
This year’s North American tour of The Animation Show, opening Wednesday, October 22, and running through Friday, October 24, as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, features a collection of award-winning animated shorts from eight countries. They were chosen by the co-producers, Academy Award nominee Don Hertzfeldt…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenerian hero of the sublime Czech tragicomedy Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he sniffs to the obsequious sales agent at…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole; it’s really half a movie waiting for a proper ending, which is due to arrive in the next volume in February 2004. Until…
In case the stunning French documentary Winged Migration somehow flew right by you during its long and fruitful run at the Mayan, you can still catch it on the giant IMAX screen at United Artists’ Colorado Center, I-25 and Colorado Boulevard. Shooting over three years on all seven continents, director…
The blood-spattered French thriller Demonlover offers about as blunt an indictment of international business culture as you’ll see in any movie. With a dedication that borders on mania, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Les Destinees) attacks what he sees as the greed, ruthless ambition and Byzantine chicanery lurking behind high-powered…
It seems like everybody’s raving up Mexican cinema these days — either as a merit badge of self-conscious hipness or because the stuff is impressive, and sometimes both — but the excitement is definitely merited with Herod’s Law (La Ley de Herodes). This movie kicks the feisty Y Tu Mam´…
In the Starz FilmCenter’s “Language of Film” series, which starts on Tuesday, October 7, Denver filmmaker Alexandre Philippe will examine three great films from a storyteller’s point of view, deconstructing narrative to reveal what he calls the movies’ “hidden anatomy.” Certainly, he will have superb material to work with. On…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Recently, ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad-boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good-boy” penguin,…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern-fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is dynamite;…
If your name ends in a vowel and your people came over in steerage a hundred years ago, you will almost certainly find yourself in the kitchen these days, wooden spoon in hand, plum tomatoes draining in the colander, thoughts drifting between sweet nostalgia and the malaise of indefinable loss…
Devotees of grim drama and great acting are in for a treat this Saturday, September 20, when the 1964 British classic The Pumpkin Eater screens at the Tattered Cover Free Film Series at the Starz FilmCenter. Adapted from a best-selling novel of the day by Penelope Mortimer, it features Anne…
Four years later, the Columbine massacre (and school shootings elsewhere) leaves more questions unanswered than resolved, despite the relentless efforts of psychiatrists, social commentators of every political stripe and baffled law-enforcement officers to explain them. In his remarkable first feature film, Home Room, writer-director Paul F. Ryan declines to analyze…
Many observant Jews in Israel and America are outraged by writer-director Eitan Gorlin’s brash first feature, The Holy Land, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not every day you encounter a film about an uncertain rabbinical student who falls in love with a Russian prostitute — in the holy…
Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is not just one of the world’s great fantasists; he’s one of the most painterly filmmakers alive, and a vivid thinker who revels in taking chances with moods and spells and narrative experiments. Princess Mononoke was the first Miyazaki film to enjoy great acclaim in America,…
Hollywood has always been an easy target, especially when it turns the gun on itself. The makers of New Suit, a new wiseass movie-industry satire, include a French director, Francois Velle, who never has made a U.S. film until now, and a young screenwriter, Craig Sherman, whose most notable previous…
Strange as it sounds, political theorists and trained economists may get an even bigger charge out of Tycoon: A New Russian than admirers of great movies like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, which chronicle the rise and fall of ambitious men. Directed by Pavel Lounguine from a barely fictionalized novel…
Talk about weird cinematic experiences: The German department at Colorado College is presenting a series of ten Third Reich-era films this fall under the rubric “Between Entertainment and Propaganda: Popular German Films of the 1930s.” These largely forgotten works all come from the so-called Gleichschaultung period (1933-39), when Adolf Hitler…
From the beginning, in the 1960s, Sergio Leone’s justly famous “spaghetti Westerns” had about them both a whiff of excitement and an air of folly. Here was an extroverted Italian working in Spain, reinventing American history and American movie mythology with an abandon that bordered on craziness. Leone’s style was…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the eleven-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
Get the lawn chairs folded, the picnic basket stuffed with goodies and the kids firmly in tow. The last film of the summer in the ultra-popular Boulder Outdoor Cinema series will be screened this Saturday night, August 30. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is not just for…
