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…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Thankfully for the United States of America, slavery is one aspect of our past that we have struggled with and overcome. Or so most of us think. The fact of the matter is, there are more slaves on the planet today than were taken from Africa in more than 400…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
The old people remember the past,” a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of aged Native Americans who may have had their lands taken away, but not their history or memories. For the length of Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 feature, the…
There are copious ways to link How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Both are based on feather-light books that take a good hour to read for those who scan slowly; both feature actors on the cult side of stardom who do far better…
Redolent of Roman decadence and authority gone mad, the title Religulous rolls pleasingly off the tongue. But Bill Maher’s one-man standup attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite — a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips from…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues. There are sweaty flashbacks and splayed-out flash-forwards, too. The only time someone’s getting laid in a bedroom, it’s during a staged rape…
The Duchess is the best women’s movie of the summer. Don’t get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and The Women set the bar so dismally low that almost any film with a dame in it who doesn’t channel her identity only through buying, boogying or bedding is…
The history of film adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft is almost universally atrocious, so understand that saying Cthulhu is among the best movies based on his work is damnation by faint praise — like saying someone is the kindest of serial killers. Set in the very near future,…
The movie Starship Troopers is an utter failure as an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s revered classic science-fiction novel, which is enough to damn it in the eyes of many fans. But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy the film on its own merits. Like director Paul Verhoeven’s first…
It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of Ghost Town — an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Frighteners — Gervais, as Bertram…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had…
From the standpoint of 2008, the French new wave that broke half a century ago is a towering monument to a particular moment — a solitary whitecap in a Courbet seascape. What was that surge? As a film critic or a filmmaker (or, in most cases, both), each of the…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the fourteen-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
“So fuckin’ delicate, people…they die so easily,” says a supporting character to the titular Boy A, whose barely audible two-word reply — “She didn’t” — collapses his violent past into his remorseful present with offhand poignancy. Boy A knows that people don’t always die easily, but he’s haunted by firsthand…
We might think that with our modern sensibilities, horror movies and special effects, we’ve seen everything creepy and weird there is to see on the big screen. But we forget that fairy tales aren’t all Disney cartoons and catchy songs: The Little Mermaid experienced stabbing pain every time she took…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
