Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Emily Osment is coming to Elitch Gardens for a free concert tomorrow night and my two kids, ages nine and seven, couldn’t be more excited. Why? Well, because I apparently have let them listen to Radio Disney a lot and watch…
Colorado Art Survey. Over the years, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant has relentlessly sought out and acquired new things for the institution’s permanent collection. In the current exhibit, Colorado Art Survey, he shows off some of these conquests and brings other things out of storage. There are some rarely seen…
While Hollywood has belatedly cooled on snarky, loud-quiet-loud proto-Tarantino gangster comedies, our English-speaking brethren across the Atlantic remain steadfast, pumping public money into spawns of Sexy Beast and maintaining full employment for slumming stage-trained thespians. By no means the worst of the lot, Gaelic import Perrier’s Bounty might be the…
In Steve Carell’s first few episodes of the American version of The Office, his character, Michael Scott, hewed closely to the template created by the series’ British mastermind, Ricky Gervais. Scott, like David Brent before him, was cruel and obtuse, a nightmare of a boss who thinks he’s a leader…
Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass has plenty of fans — it copped an award at Cannes in 2009 — but I don’t see what they see. The 87-year-old filmmaker’s latest is an insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault. Adapted from a novel by Christian Gailly,…
Colorado Art Survey. Over the years, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant has relentlessly sought out and acquired new things for the institution’s permanent collection. In the current exhibit, Colorado Art Survey, he shows off some of these conquests and brings other things out of storage. There are some rarely seen…
Not lacking conviction or cojones, Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora is a big, broad, stridently atheistic sword-and-sandals entertainment that recounts a tragic turning point in world history. Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, a brilliant astronomer in fourth-century Alexandria whose life and work is increasingly threatened by a bloody societal shift toward reactionary, virulent…
Salt, famously the Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: Finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course — Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero…
An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade’s provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade’s two-hour squirmathon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish. The 34-year-old German director’s…
Colorado Art Survey. Over the years, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant has relentlessly sought out and acquired new things for the institution’s permanent collection. In the current exhibit, Colorado Art Survey, he shows off some of these conquests and brings other things out of storage. There are some rarely seen…
Beer and sausage and mullets and mayhem are the stuff of a young Belgian teen’s upbringing in The Misfortunates, Felix Van Groeningen’s earthy adaptation of Dimitri Verhulst’s popular novel. Thirteen-year-old Gunther Stobbe (Kenneth Vanbaeden) plays little brother to four rowdy, strapping Stobbes — his hooting dad (Koen de Graeve) and…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche…of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s followup offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows —indicators of…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and Jules (Annette Bening…
Altered. This duet pairs abstract sculptor Mark Castator with realist painter Marie Vlasic, and though their works are unrelated, the show looks good anyway. Castator, a master with welded metal, is best known for his marvelous spheres and columns made from small pieces of sawed steel tubes. For these latest…
The grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy — featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) — moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the…
As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the six-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny — not like Toy Story 3.” Now, don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie. It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the…
Implicit in its title, the premise of The Killer Inside Me — directed by Michael Winterbottom from Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel — could be summed up in a classified ad: Texas cop with pleasant boyish demeanor seeks compliant dames for sadistic sex games culminating in murder. What complicates this tale is…
James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble southern Missouri woods. But in Winter’s Bone, a…
