They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life — and less than…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Revanche defied both the odds and the standard formula in earning Austria a richly deserved Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Director Götz Spielmann’s latest deals with crime, a subject typically seen as insufficiently important for such an honor. Moreover, the main characters — a rough-hewn ex-con (Johannes Krisch), a…
Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…
Barbara Takenaga and Mary Ehrin. These two solos feature contemporary work that’s informed by the influence of nature. Barbara Takenaga: Fade Away & Radiate, comprises a nice selection of abstracts by a New York artist who lived for many years in Colorado. Mary Ehrin: Rockspace is an installation by a…
“I just want to blend in,” claims banjoist Béla Fleck early in Throw Down Your Heart, a documentary about his musical journey to Africa (where the banjo originated). A moment later, after glancing at the native performers around him, he admits, “I’m not going to blend in.” Yet he often…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
Barbara Takenaga and Mary Ehrin. These two solos feature contemporary work that’s informed by the influence of nature. Barbara Takenaga: Fade Away & Radiate, comprises a nice selection of abstracts by a New York artist who lived for many years in Colorado. Mary Ehrin: Rockspace is an installation by a…
Like Hancock, the Will Smith flick from last year, 2007’s Big Man Japan tweaks the superhero myth by focusing on a shaggy, thoroughly unconventional guardian of society — one who has more critics than fans. But whereas the former falls to earth thanks to a plot loaded with psychodrama and…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’s solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…
The stately Japanese movie Departures comes to theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what Academy voters saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for renewed respect toward…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Standards of Ethical Conduct, premiering on Saturday, June 6, is the sort of local production worth rooting for, despite its many imperfections. Written and directed by Roman Hardgrave, the mid-length flick — at just over forty minutes, it’s too long for a short, too brief for a feature — revolves…
What Fletch was to plaid-clad watercooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, 2003’s Old School was to Gen-X frat rats: a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters trying to capture…
And now for the story of Lips and the dildo. Back in the late ’70s, before Guitar Hero III or Rock of Love 2 or even VH1, a jolly Canadian guitarist named Steve “Lips” Kudlow formed a thrash band with his high-school best friend, drummer Robb Reiner (no relation to…
“The cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that’s true — and who are we to dispute the Master? — then summertime is when we gorge (unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-’em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies). This…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of…
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the auteur behind Three Monkeys, didn’t win the best-director bauble at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his hyperkinetic visuals and mastery of the smash cut. On his latest, he tends to set his camera in place and allow it to stare pitilessly at his subjects for…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
