Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings and inconspicuous public spaces, travel under assumed names and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. Some come to give information, others to…
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…
Nothing But the Truth, the opening-night attraction for the Thursday, February 12, launch of the Boulder International Film Festival, is an old-fashioned Hollywood flick in the best sense of the term. The plot, about a reporter (Kate Beckinsale) who goes to jail à la New York Times lightning rod Judith…
The Confessions of a Shopaholic we need right now would be a handheld doc featuring former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain sobbing into the camera and begging the American public to forgive him for purchasing a $35,000 commode. With its curious release date — the film is meant to be…
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…
Shocking but true: Eden’s title is meant ironically. Director Declan Recks’s film, which opens on Friday, February 6, at the Starz FilmCenter, focuses on Billy (Aidan Kelly) and Breda (Eileen Walsh), a working-class Irish couple whose relationship is frequently described by their friends as ideal even though no evidence of…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired eleven-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own —…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You — which sold a regrettable two million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…
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…
She’s too thin. She’s a bobblehead. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? Did the Oscar from Cold Mountain ruin her forever, or is Kenny Chesney to blame? It’s not easy being America’s Sweetheart. Nor any easier being Lucy…
The crowds were thinner, the temperature warmer, and Barack Obama’s name mentioned so many times that you might have thought he had assumed leadership not just of the free world, but the Sundance Institute, too. Otherwise, it was business as relatively usual as the Sundance Film Festival turned 25. If…
Even as an ardent, tireless fan of zombie cinema, I’ve never seen anything quite like Otto; or, Up With Dead People. Existing in some heretofore undiscovered common ground between the arthouse and the grindhouse, Otto is a tale of a young gay zombie in a cruel world that’s as dead…
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…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts they’re reciting from. Mo has abstained from…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
The first time I saw The Toxic Avenger — possibly on HBO or Cinemax — in the late 1980s, I was floored. It was absurd, graphic, gross, and fit into none of the movie archetypes I was familiar with. Needless to say, I was hooked — and I wasn’t alone…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
One of the most persistent legends about the Chinese martial arts is that their world-famous crowning glory, shaolin kwan (Shaolin temple boxing), was actually invented by a visitor from India. Admittedly, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the story began to get around that in the mid-500s CE, during…
Adam Helms. This solo in the MCA’s Paper Works Gallery is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind, very…very…slowly. Yustman plays Casey,…
Ari Folman’s broodingly original Waltz With Bashir is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Folman, whose magic-realist youth film Saint Clara was one of the outstanding Israeli films of the 1990s, has created a grim, deeply personal phantasmagoria around the 1982 invasion…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious followup to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
