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…
Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads…prepare yourself…thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing terrorist thriller…
Until the untimely death of singer/guitarist D. Boon at the end of 1985, the Minutemen were one of the most exciting and creative bands of their era. The documentary We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen — which kicks off a four-part film series called Our Band Could Be…
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…
The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf a good 25 years. Which isn’t to suggest that it’s fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn’t squander his first feature-film starring role…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
In its final ten minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise and nonsense, and those are ten perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the eighty or so…
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…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer-director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
Bottle Shock, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is a great concept populated by great actors that works hard to make its audience feel great! Only, sadly, it’s far, far from a great movie — a little too sweet to the taste, almost sickly so. Indeed, it’s…
