Rumba, which begins its run on Friday, May 22, following a Wednesday-evening preview, is a loopy slab of filmic absurdism that has more in common with the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco than with the movies of Keenan Ivory Wayans and Judd Apatow. Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
Imagine having reached the highest level of skill in your field through hours of grueling work that began when you were four years old. Now imagine knowing that you’ll never get a permanent job, but will, if you’re lucky, be hired periodically — that is, if your potential boss likes…
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…
The late Pauline Kael named her 1968 collection of film reviews Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in celebration of movies at their most visceral – the ones in which sex and violence and speed combine in ways that produce sheer sensation. Thirty years later, Run Lola Run, screening at midnight on…
At the tail end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around scenic Paris and London for over two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’s Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, sloped off back…
Jim Jarmusch’s anonymous anti-hero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of Control as the Lone Man, exists only in terms of his unspecified mission. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking…
Director Carlos Saura is an elegant stylist with a passion for song and dance that comes through in every frame of Fados, opening Friday, May 8, at Starz FilmCenter. The movie is essentially a series of music videos that are linked sonically — all of the material is derived from…
It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’s relaunching of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, he reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing…
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…
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…
Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, eighteen years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most cliched genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though on paper its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…
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…
The sophistication and cynicism of the typical film-goer these days means that cinematic simplicity is damnably hard to pull off — but Iranian director Majid Majidi manages to do so anyhow with The Song of Sparrows, which opens on Friday, April 24. The tale revolves around Karim (Reza Naji), a…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the last four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
Collective Nouns. Metropolitan State College isn’t just one of the city’s major institutions of higher learning; it’s also the state’s largest art school. The most obvious evidence of this is the college’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo, a mini-museum. A more subtle indication of the importance of art at…
The inaugural Scandinavian Film Festival is a modest affair in terms of numbers — just four films, only one of which is feature length. But it makes up in freshness what it lacks in width and breadth. The centerpiece flick, You, the Living (pictured), from director Roy Andersson, was described…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’s sweaty,…
