Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide and…
A man in a Michael Jackson outfit — red shirt, black jeans, white face mask — rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a stuffed monkey puppet with angel wings. The background is a nondescript go-kart track…
The idea behind the Gaia Film Festival is that simple choices can inspire us to make a difference, thus changing the world, one choice at a time. That’s why you’ll find films such as the Colorado premiere of Saida Medvedeva’s Water, which examines the secrets of the most common substance…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
The screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything…
Loath though I am to carp about any director who’s devoted chunks of his career to bringing the non-white world’s suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode’s The Children of Huang Shi — a drama based on the life of an Englishman who saved an orphanage full of boys from Japanese…
In recent days, Universal’s been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action-figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one sneak-preview audience,…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
It’s the age-old debate: What’s better, the original, classic story, or a bells-and-whistles remake? Old-school or new-school? The Denver Film Society has joined the debate with its Old School + New School film series, which features two films, separated by decades, screened in a single night and discussed afterward by…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsized codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Dale Chisman. Since Dale Chisman is among the greatest abstract painters who ever plied their trade in Colorado, this show is unquestionably one of the most significant of the year. Recent Paintings by Dale Chisman is also a rare chance to see his work in depth, as it has been…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock is…
Video virtuoso and 2006 MasterMind winner Johnny Morehouse is hip to the fact that these days, people have short attention spans. Really short attention spans. And really short attention spans call for really short films . Five minutes sounds good; five minutes is about the maximum amount of time you…
CANNES, France—Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president’s presumed taste. Days before the 61st Cannes Film Festival ended, rumors were rife that the jury was having difficulties reaching consensus. As the award ceremony…
Explosions, pratfalls and robots, heroes, aliens and blondes: It must be summertime at the movies. Beyond the flash, though, it’s striking to note just how many movies will require us to actually think this summer. (Aren’t we supposed to save thinking for the fall?) Maybe it’s the election, but there…
Berghaus, Douglas and Riverhouse Editions. In the front spaces at Sandy Carson, there’s a whimsical yet intelligent show called Clearing: The Kinetic Sculpture of Marc Berghaus. The pieces are mechanical, with the most clever use of machinery being “Freeway Chase,” in which viewers look through the frame of a TV…
Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because nineteen years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and fifteen years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…
It’s been twenty years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’s movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event: the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of Texas…
Berghaus, Douglas and Riverhouse Editions. In the front spaces at Sandy Carson, there’s a whimsical yet intelligent show called Clearing: The Kinetic Sculpture of Marc Berghaus. The pieces are mechanical, with the most clever use of machinery being “Freeway Chase,” in which viewers look through the frame of a TV…
CANNES, France—No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez: The civilized…
Call them the comeback kids: In its early days, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival has served as a staging ground for a number of unlikely returns, beginning with that of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who’s been absent from movie screens (except as an occasional actor) for nearly as long as…
