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…
ANGST. Though unified by the title ANGST, this duet exhibit put together by Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center is actually a pair of freestanding solos: IMAGING ACROPHOBIA and NIGHTWALK. IMAGING ACROPHOBIA is Colorado photographer Andrew Beckham’s exploration of his fear of heights in a series of…
Nobody messes with Samuel L. Jackson — at least not at the movies. He’s Shaft reinvented, the coolest cop on the street. He’s Mace Windu, the only swashbuckler in the Star Wars galaxy who gets to swing a purple light-saber. Best of all, he’s Jules Winnfield, the ultra-hip hit man…
The grim little green-walled apartment where Walter finds himself after his release has the look of a jail cell — with one apparent easement. What seems to be the only window in the place faces a school playground across the street. When Walter looks outside, he often sees kids running…
Together with his brother Chris, Paul Weitz wrote and directed 2002’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, in which a cocky grown man (Hugh Grant) learned how to actually act like a grown man by observing a gawky young boy (Nicholas Hoult) who was nearly abandoned by his…
Joined at the hip and in the editing room, the peerless co-writer/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have been called “the Lennon and McCartney of British cinema” because they brought artistic striving and a daring spirit of invention to every film they made together — even the most commercial projects…
Now Showing Better Times, et al. Contemporary painter Evan Colbert has been successfully riffing on minimalism, pop art and conceptualism for the last several years — and he’s not about to stop now. Among his most interesting pieces are those in which he creates a color field based on paint…
