Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something — if only a terrible sensation of nothingness — that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable coverups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
It’s not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved (and much lampooned) Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling, if you count the Flintstone, Muppet and Barbie versions. Stuffed with simple souls winning over…
The Power of Then. Curated by Patty Ortiz, the former director of the Museo de las Américas who now runs the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, this uneven group show explores the shared Latino experience, as in old-fashioned Chicano art — hence the reference to ‘then’ in the…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The exhibit was…
The inmate who renamed himself after a Hollywood action star has been incarcerated for all but a few months of the past 34 years — thirty of them spent in solitary — having strategically attacked a succession of guards, attendants and fellow inmates to parlay his initial seven-year sentence for…
Apart from the stray slasher flick, Halloween is traditionally a dead spot on the Hollywood calendar. This week’s big release? The Michael Jackson tribute film This Is It — creepy in its own right. But Universal Studios has been raiding its catacombs for DVD reissues. Let’s brush the cobwebs aside…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native American artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this latter group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The…
Don Imus’s hateful, racist 2007 remarks about “nappy-headed hos” underscored the immense fear of, and fascination with, the hair follicles of African-American women. Chris Rock, the host, co-writer, and co-producer of first-time director Jeff Stilson’s Good Hair, never mentions Imus’s outburst; his interest in the political, social and sexual entanglements…
Like the ominous fingernail moon early on in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, the bloodsucker trend is again in a waxing phase thanks to the mass cult followings of the Twilight saga and HBO’s True Blood. However, the only authentic vampires in this first (and, I can all but…
Another one for the bad-stuff-happens-to-stupid-people file, The Canyon might at least offer the satisfaction of a few squirmy thrills if it weren’t so insistent on treating its central couple’s plight as the stuff of high tragedy. When newlyweds Nick (Eion Bailey) and Lori (Yvonne Strahovski) find their dream of riding…
Anna Kaye. The conceptual framework that underlies the drawings and watercolors that make up the handsome if small Apparition: works on paper by Anna Kaye is the effect of forest fires. Toward that end, Kaye captures the forest by employing a high level of drafting that make her drawings seem…
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubble-gum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a dybbuk — is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
What’s remarkable about Still Walking, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s seventh feature film and one every bit as sensitive as his previous triumphs After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), is that the familiar comes across as fresh. Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Kore-eda imbues the story…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
Most movies dealing with terrorism these days treat it as fundamentalist insanity or societal cancer. In contrast, 1962’s Le Combat Dans L’ile turns the subject into, of all things, a complicating factor in a love triangle. The marriage of mood-swingy Anne (Romy Scheider) and rich kid Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
Like Memento, The Escapist, screening as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, freshens what could have been a genre exercise by fiddling about with the overall structure. At its most basic level, director/co-writer Rupert Wyatt’s offering is a standard get-out-of-jail-and-be-free tale, in which a group of fairly…
