Viva Pedro: A Festival of the Best of Pedro Almodovar raises some questions — namely, which Almodovar? The Pedro gloriously festivaled and happily familiar now to middle-class film-goers is an aging, camp-centric teddy bear, a man who has made transgender game-playing and comic vamping safe for the arthouses and has…
Even curriculum-clutchers might rather leave a child behind than let her learn from Half Nelson’s Mr. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a Brooklyn junior-high teacher whose off-the-cuff history lessons are based — brace yourself, Bushies — on dialectical theory. History is change, and change, the white teacher tells the kids, most…
Those twenty-somethings, poor dears, can never catch a break in the movies. First this maligned generation is told, in countless gritty indies and perky studio comedies, that they’re rowing through life without oars. Now director Tony Goldwyn’s admirably understated handling of dispiritingly slender material suggests that if you’re pushing thirty,…
An act, more than anything, of due homage and genuflection to David Mamet the ’70s-’80s theatrical provocateur (as opposed to Mamet the ’90s-’00s screenplay doodler), the film version of his 1983 one-act play Edmond is a pleasant actor’s spectacle. You never have to get involved; like so much of Mamet’s…
Granted, this may seem like a jarringly odd comparison, but like the recent dud Phat Girlz, Heading South deals with the hot-button issue of middle-aged women discovering their sexuality anew thanks to the efforts of muscular black men with exotic accents whose standards of female beauty are more flexible than…
Released last year, the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days recalls the dark days of Nazi Germany in a fresh and disturbing new way — through the ordeal of an intelligent, idealistic university student (Julia Jentsch) who challenges the regime by distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a classroom building. In February…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
I Am a Sex Addict (IFC) Caveh Zahedi has made a movie of our times — a strange mix of self-absorption, shamelessness in the pursuit of fame, and sex. Most shocking of all is that it works. Part fiction and documentary, confessional and comedy, the film traces the history of…
If Superman Returns attempted to resurrect the Man of Steel as mythic hero, the season’s other Superman movie wants to disabuse us of any such childish illusions. Glamorously adult, Hollywoodland purports to part the veil on the circumstances by which George Reeves, the actor who embodied the superhero on ’50s…
When we first see Ellie (Diane Gaidry), the younger of two damaged heroines in Jacques Thelemaque’s The Dogwalker, she’s the picture of unhinged desperation. Ill-concealed by big sunglasses, her heavily battered face features a recently split lower lip, one so swollen that she can barely make herself understood when requesting…
A number of pregnant mysteries arise with the new remake of Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult-remembered genre work. Namely, what’s in this kind of malarkey for gender-combat provocateur Neil LaBute, and why was such a high-profile film tossed into theaters last Friday without letting critics see it first? The two simple…
Director Claude Chabrol’s fascination with the pathologies submerged in middle-class life takes a vivid and scary new turn in The Bridesmaid, the second film he’s adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel (following La Cérémonie). This time, an unsuspecting young man (soulful Benoit Magimel) falls into the clutches of a seductive…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
United 93 (Universal) A suggestion to those who’ve put off watching the year’s most wrenching and essential film: Before rolling the feature, first watch the documentary in which the families of those who died on the plane give the filmmakers their blessing, without reservation. If the mother, father, and sister…
If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, but he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. Forget that it’s a year old; this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration…
After declining an invitation to “embed” with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq, film director Deborah Scranton went the military one better by supplying Sony miniDV video cameras to members of Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment. The result is the most compelling Iraq documentary to date…
Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970. Though some believe that Colorado art doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because it’s so far behind the times, they’re wrong. Take modernist abstraction, for example: Local artists, especially those in Colorado Springs, were working in styles such as cubo-regionalism, surrealism and abstract expressionism as early as artists…
Arrested Development: Season Three (Fox) The final collection of Arrested Development discs feels sadly incomplete: only 13 episodes this time, the result of Fox’s inability to attract viewers to one of TV’s greatest comedies and the network’s unwillingness to give it a full farewell. But none of that diminishes the…
One of the weakest and most ridiculous aspects of popular culture is its narcissistic now-ness. There’s often no then or later, and without past experience or the messy knowledge of life, modern entertainment media often seems poached in a neurotic teenage brainpan, entranced with its own ignorant tunnel vision. A…
Low — which is to say no — expectations can be a wonderful thing: Expect nothing, and maybe you’ll get that little outta-nowhere sumpin-sumpin that turns an otherwise unfulfilling occurrence into a vaguely rewarding experience. It’s not like Invincible boasts the most promising of credentials: a first-time filmmaker (Ericson Core,…
A first-time feature film about a failed indie rocker, his beautiful girlfriend and his sanctimonious nature-boy brother on a road trip: There are so many ways that The Puffy Chair could have gone wrong. But it doesn’t — not once. Like Funny Ha Ha, the casually raw 2002 faux-cinéma-verité indie…
