Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation relies more on…
Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist — I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month, when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage movie-goer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
So we covered the Open Water-meets-Aspen Extreme epic Frozen before it opened in January. The trailer and the concept of a thriller about something as boring as sitting on a chairlift in the dark made me laugh quite a bit, but not enough to try and see the movie. Its…
Agreeing at the insistence of a Corsican mob boss to suck and then slash a fellow inmate, newly jailed Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) — poor, illiterate, a “dirty Arab” in the prison’s racist pecking order — gets what’s coming to him, but in a good way. Indeed, crime pays…
Matisse called the Barnes Foundation “the only sane place to see art in America.” But the clamor over moving one of the world’s foremost collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and modern art from its home in the bucolic suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, to center city Philadelphia (4.6 miles away) has been…
At fifteen years old, Avery is a bright, gorgeous, gifted athlete who is very much loved by her white, Brooklyn Jewish lesbian mothers. She’s also black, has a transracial older brother at Princeton and a younger one who was born in Korea, both of whom she adores. Bearing in mind…
Amy Metier et al. The impressive Amy Metier: Palimpsest features recent paintings by one of Colorado’s foremost abstract painters, Amy Metier. Metier’s style relates back to early-twentieth-century vanguard painting, combining elements of cubism and abstract expressionism. Her large canvases and small works on paper fill the main space at Havu,…
Better late than never — a bang-bang pulse-pounder predicated on the Bush administration’s deliberate fabrication of WMDs in Iraq. Paul Greengrass’s expertly assembled Green Zone has evidently been parked for some time on Universal’s shelf. Had the movie been released during the 2008 election season, it might have been something…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Set in the white, lower-class, upstate New York dead end of Mohawk Valley, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country follows four generations of Moshers from one October 31st to the next, and, in between days of the dead, the spooks linger. Halloween itself is a Mosher obsession, a leveler…
Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: A Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an eleven-year-old girl watches her mother get shot. It’s the first sign that here is a film that won’t content itself with just charting the little measures…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
A quintet of pathetic pals are sized up in 44 Inch Chest, an often sharp, nasty exposé of masculinity written by Sexy Beast scripters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, reuniting them with that film’s Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Married for 21 years, Colin (Winstone) is told by wife Liz…
All that remains of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day is Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance, his baddest and best. The rest of the movie? A blustering stumble toward parody — an overwrought, operatic buddy-cop flip-flop also starring Ethan Hawke as the rookie put to the test again and again by the devil…
Now a 305-minute triptych film, Red Riding originated in the novels of Ossett-bred David Peace, written in Tokyo and published 1999-2002. Looking back without nostalgia to the Yorkshire of his youth, the books summoned what Brit critic Simon Reynolds once called the “sheer crapness of England in the late ’70s,”…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
It’s a telling detail that indie film’s premier misanthrope, Neil LaBute, has an executive-producer credit on writer-director Lee Toland Krieger’s scathing dysfunctional-clan dramedy, The Vicious Kind. Meet small-town Connecticut construction worker Caleb Sinclaire (Adam Scott, blistering), a sleep-deprived misogynist who maliciously projects his bitterness and insecurities on anyone foolish enough…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” of black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swaggering stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith (who notably didn’t write the Cop Out script; this is the Clerks auteur’s…
Katie Jarvis, who makes her acting debut as a rabid teenager in writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, was discovered on an English railway station platform, yelling at her boyfriend. Whether Jarvis is a natural-born actress or simply playing herself as Mia, a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old child of the Essex projects with…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Already a blogosphere punching bag for right-wing Christians, Creation — about Charles Darwin’s writing of On the Origin of Species — commits the sin of thoughtfulness, and is quite moving in the process. Director Jon Amiel, working from a screenplay by John Collee, injects flashes of artsy craftsmanship (time-lapse photography depicting…
