The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
Bride and Prejudice is the third major American film in the past few years to fuse the epic romantic musical stylings of Indian “Bollywood” movies with more Westernized, “Hollywood” elements. It’s also the most successful of them, but when the only significant competition has been The Guru and Bollywood/Hollywood, that…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
If you want to know what Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is all about, it’s pretty easy to sum up. It starts with a big fight, as a group of local villagers plays capture the flag in the branches of a large tree. Then there’s a brief stretch of plot, as…
The White House and the Pentagon don’t find the French very funny these days, but you might. The Denver Film Society’s five-week Comédies à la Française series begins Wednesday, February 9, with Cedric Klapisch’s rollicking sex farce L’Auberge Espagnole (2003), in which seven coeds living in a Barcelona apartment confound…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
When we first see Tony Fingleton, the plucky Australian hero of Swimming Upstream, he’s a cute little guy getting cuffed around by his vile big brother, Harold Jr. That’s just the beginning of a long ordeal. For the next two hours of screen time, Tony (played as a teenager by…
The Sea Inside, the new right-to-die drama from Spanish director Alejandro Amen´bar (The Others), is a flawed film that’s worth seeing. Based on Letters From Hell, a book by quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro about his thirty-year quest to kill himself, the movie favors the emotional over the legal, centering on Sampedro’s…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare¹s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
If you can make it past the first ten minutes or so of Hide and Seek without busting up laughing, chances are that you’ve never seen a horror movie before in your life. This hack job of a “thriller” may steal from the best, but it does it so badly…
The thirteenth annual Black History Month Film & Video Festival this weekend will feature two films by the renowned Mexican documentarian Rafael R. Corona, as well as a 29-minute look at a late, lamented African-American bookstore here in Denver and a piece on the plight of Haitians as seen by…
Andy Miller. One of the most thoughtful artists around, Andy Miller is the subject of a self-titled solo at Pirate. Miller is known for his postmodern sculptures and installations in which oversized and simplified figures play key dramatic roles. For this installation, Miller has built two monumental figures, one representing…
Some people think they’re a new art form; others see them as adolescent time-killers. Whatever they are, video games don’t make good models for feature films (mostly because their interactive essence is lost), and their clumsy transfer to the big screen continues to invite all kinds of speculation — not…
With all due respect to the barbecue kings who enlivened The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a pair of deranged Danes called The Green Butchers would likely win the cordon bleu for cannibal cuisine. Hannibal Lecter himself might savor something called “Svend’s Chicky-Wickies” — not poultry at all, of course, but fillet…
When did we first encounter a feel-good film that united delinquent kids, a devoted (if professionally frustrated) teacher and the transformative power of music? Was it with Julie Andrews? Could it have been the spirited, soft-hearted Maria and her Austrian brood, trilling their way up the hills above the abbey?…
In her first stab at narrative drama, writer-director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…
Last fall, the Swiss-French, Denver-based director Alexandre O. Philippe completed a profoundly weird and wonderfully engaging documentary called Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water — a vivid look at the quirky obsessions of members of something called the Klingon Language Institute. For those who have confined their travels, real and…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a red-stater through and through, you certainly won’t want to — but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign, torn apart by housecats in…
Assault on Precinct 13, the sluggish remake of John Carpenter’s grungy 1976 movie of the same name, begins with a bang to which it never lives up. In a smoky den of all manner of iniquity, Ethan Hawke’s trying to close a drug deal. With his girl splayed out on…
The promos read: “24 hours. 350 miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong?” In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay; bratty kids stripped of depth and personality; a single joke replayed in every scene; unearned attempts at sentiment; and a…
When the great French director Jean Renoir immigrated to the United States, he wasted no time making an American masterpiece that is, in the view of many film scholars, the equal of Grand Illusion or The Rules of the Game. The Southerner, released in 1945, chronicles the struggle of a…
