This much can be said for the movie version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Its villain, Count Olaf, just might be Jim Carrey’s finest screen role. A bitter, would-be master thespian who delights in donning ridiculous disguises and adopting funny accents, he doesn’t seem that far removed…
The story is simple enough: Sometime during the dying days of the Tang Dynasty in China, though it could really be any time and any place, two cops named Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sit in a station house drinking tea. They decide that one of them will…
Catherine Breillat’s Sex Is Comedy could serve as a companion piece to a pair of earlier French movies about making movies — Franois Truffaut’s enduring valentine Day for Night and the entertaining 2001 farce My Wife Is an Actress. But Breillat, who most recently gave us a scorching glimpse into…
Anxiety and Desire. Clare Cornell, assistant professor of digital imaging at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, put together Anxiety and Desire, an exhibit of photo-based pieces that address psychological concepts. He included work from an array of artists from around the country, each working in their own ways, though…
If you’ve already decided to see Ocean’s Twelve, it’s probably best not to read much about it. Unlike its predecessor, a remake that clung to a hoary heist formula, the sequel contains ample pleasures, most of which amuse as the result of surprises both great and small. There’s no one…
Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana’s fascinating documentary Overnight is a kind of instructional video about how to fail in showbiz. Actually, that’s putting it too gently. It’s really about willful self-immolation, about letting raw ego and crazy delusion run amok, about driving friends and family into storms of rage…
Those familiar with the films of David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls) probably have one big question about his latest feature, Undertow: Is there more of a story this time? The answer isŠsort of. Green, who favors meditative, meandering portraits and is often compared to Terrence Malick…
They walk among us. They resemble people, approximate our words and actions, present themselves more or less as human. And yet they are more — a different species, with their own dark legends, their own clandestine meeting places. They are dorks, and they are going to be pretty okay with…
All right, all right. It’s well established that White Christmas (1954) wasn’t nearly as good as its model, Holiday Inn, and never will be. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen were more energetic and appealing in other musicals, where the plots weren’t so thin and the dancing was better. And,…
Anxiety and Desire. Clare Cornell, assistant professor of digital imaging at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, put together Anxiety and Desire, an exhibit of photo-based pieces that address psychological concepts. He included work from an array of artists from around the country, each working in their own ways, though…
The new Mike Nichols film, Closer, is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing that we might take for outright soap opera or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn, were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of its dialogue…
Movies pushing the indomitablity of human nature tend to make me want to puke, mainly because they’re often created with a palpable self-congratulatory air by film-biz insiders whose real-life concept of “suffering” extends to being brought an incorrectly prepared frappuccino. This emetic response is doubled when the featured indomitable human…
One of the most compelling films of 2004, first-time indie director Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace is a drug movie that has no machine guns and no car chases, just an unforgettable portrait of a sixteen-year-old Colombian girl (played by the extraordinary Catalina Sandino Moreno) forced by circumstance to…
Anxiety and Desire. Clare Cornell, assistant professor of digital imaging at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, put together Anxiety and Desire, an exhibit of photo-based pieces that address psychological concepts. He included work from an array of artists from around the country, each working in their own ways, though…
If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…
It’s the biopic of the year: Christian Bale is cadaverous industrial rocker Trent Reznor, prone to temper tantrums, brooding, inhabiting colorless environments and keeping your parents awake all night as he fronts the alterna-heavy-metal band known as Nine Inch Nails. Oh, wait…that’s not quite right. Christian Bale is, in fact,…
As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…
Patrice Leconte’s Intimate Strangers develops from an intriguing premise: A troubled woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) making her first visit to a psychiatrist walks into the wrong office and starts pouring out her troubles to a baffled (but captivated) tax lawyer (Fabrice Luchini). Too beguiled to set things straight, the lonely lawyer…
Charles Parson, Emilio Lobato, Jason Needham. The cavernous Lower Galleries at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities have been given over to the awe-inspiring Charles Parson: Landscape’s Sonnet, a huge solo that includes constructivist drawings, wall relief panels, sculptures and installations. As if that isn’t enough, Parson also…
U.S. Postal Service workers who think they have it tough should probably get a look at Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains. In this deceptively simple and surprisingly moving film set in the early 1980s, a weary Chinese mailman, his wide-eyed, 24-year-old son and their faithful, knowing dog take three…
Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy’s popular, but…
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998’s Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight — which is only appropriate,…
