Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
Agent Fox Mulder, the coolly instinctual sleuth of The X-Files, got pretty good at unraveling paranormal mysteries. If only the actor who played him were as adept at solving the riddle of his movie career. David Duchovny’s new vanity project, House of D, is the tortured tale of a thirteen-year-old…
It seems unlikely that any American outside of a cloistered, sports-averse, PBS-watching film reviewer would have failed to notice the 2002 arrival of Yao Ming, the 7’6″ gentle giant also known as China’s national basketball hero and, in the U.S., the number-one pick in the NBA draft — especially since,…
One attraction of foreign films is the glimpse they provide of exotic lands. But after viewing a startling coming-of-age drama called Schizo, you probably won’t call the travel agent to book ten days in Kazakhstan. Or ten minutes. As revealed by first-time director Guka Omarova and cinematographer Khasanbek Kydyraliyev, this…
Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’s demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…
Can eleven years really have passed? Quentin Tarantino cultists own it on DVD (or at least VHS), and they’ve all watched it nineteen times. But there’s something special about seeing Pulp Fiction again on the big screen, in the company of your yawping, warped, movie-crazed fellow enthusiasts. Where do you…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer/director/star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work: It’s a direct reference…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
Perhaps no filmmaker working today better exemplifies the great humanist tradition of Italian neo-realism than the gifted Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, whose movies — A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq (aka Songs of My Motherland), and now Turtles Can Fly — deal with the plight of the Kurdish…
The Game of Their Lives is the second movie in the past three years with that title, and also the second about a major soccer upset during the World Cup. The first was a documentary about the North Korean team of 1966; while it was fascinating, it has yet to…
Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
Amanda Peet. Ashton Kutcher. Romantic comedy. Who’d have thought it could work? And yet A Lot Like Love is an entertainment success, a triple threat of fresh writing, inspired directing and, yes, good acting. Fortified with a healthy dose of intelligence, it manages to leap clear across an entire field…
The Denver Art Museum’s beautifully chosen series The Art of Silent Film continues this week with a screening of Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), G.W. Pabst’s socially prophetic melodrama about a German pharmacist’s daughter (American Louise Brooks) whose big-city innocence leads her to a reformatory, then a brothel. Strategically…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film-school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year is more likely to find it a pretentious load of crap. Set in contemporary London and…
Lost Embrace, by Argentinean director Daniel Burman, looks more like a handheld video by the purist Dogme school of Denmark. Centered in Buenos Aires, it’s an unevenly amusing comedy of family reconciliation that looks like a thumb in the eye and tastes of Europudding throughout. Ariel is a hangdog thirty-something…
The Woody Allen who wrote and directed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) back in 1972 was not yet the full-bloom, all-promises-delivered Woody who gave us Annie Hall and Manhattan — but at least he wasn’t the inert and seemingly dispirited moviemaker who…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its…
When was the last time you walked out of a theater feeling shell-shocked, saying to anyone who would listen (in language more profane): “Dude, that was some seriously messed-up stuff!” Not your garden-variety messed-up stuff, mind you, like in Saw. Not the messed-up revelations of political docs. We’re talking the…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than twenty years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
