lint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artistŠwith a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-Western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself a break…
At first glance, White Noise looks like one more supernatural thriller aimed at an audience that’s easily scared and easily parted from its hard-earned cash. It will be lumped in among the Rings, Grudges, Otherses and other gotcha creepshows inhabited by rancorous ghosts and pissed-off ghouls out to off those…
The early reviews for Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic on which Kevin Spacey did everything except feed the crew and sweep the set, have been so hateful that a latecomer to the bashing bash is tempted to head straight for the spiked eggnog and let the man pass…
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 chips and…
Our best movies of the year may actually have been anything but the best to a few of our critics: Such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team of Bill Gallo,…
The Gospel According to Mel Who needs studio publicists when every fundamentalist pastor in the country is herding his flock to the multiplex? Why waste good money on TV spots when the Vatican is handing out rave reviews? No doubt about it, Thomas, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ…
While Michael Moore and Mel Gibson garnered most of this year’s critical attention, plenty of fine films opened to little or no fanfare. Following are our reviewers’ favorite movies that didn’t draw the adulation they deserved. Consider yourself armed for the next trip to Blockbuster. Control Room. In a year…
ANGST. Though unified by the title ANGST, this duet 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 large-scale…
By all accounts, the only living creatures who’ve never taken in a stage production of The Phantom of the Opera are Osama bin Laden and Uncle Elmer’s deaf hound dog, Bart — which means that everyone else on the planet has an opinion about how Joel Schumacher’s zillion-dollar movie version…
The parade of real-life figures strolling into the googolplex has been endless this year: Look, there’s Jamie Foxx as musical Mount Rushmore Ray Charles; Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie; Kevin Spacey as forgotten teeny-popper Bobby Darin; Liam Neeson as sexologist Alfred Kinsey; Kevin Kline as standards composer…
When your movie gets riotous laughter from endless utterances of the word “Focker,” it doesn’t have to try very hard. So it’s no surprise that much of Meet the Fockers, the inevitable sequel to the 2000 hit Meet the Parents, barely breaks a sweat. When in doubt, after all, just…
“I know why I hate integrity,” moans Jeremy Irons late in Callas Forever. “It’s great for the person who has it; it’s pure hell for those around it.” Indeed. As tacky, ponytailed impresario Larry Kelly, Irons makes for one seriously deranged philosopher, but his dedication to the late opera legend…
The critic who takes notes during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou will ultimately fill a notepad only with scribbled details: “All the crewmen wear red stocking caps with their tuxedos”; “Some names of Zissou’s movies: The Battling Eels of Antibes, Shadow Creatures of the Lurisia Archipelago, Island Cats!”; “One…
Released in 1960, La Dolce Vita is the film that gave currency to the term “Fellini-esque” — and a name to a lot of lousy Italian restaurants in the rural Midwest. The most famous and most accessible of Federico Fellini’s works, it’s a heady mixture of Catholic iconography and sexual…
ANGST. Though unified by the title ANGST, this duet 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 large-scale…
In Spanglish, which is less a story than a snapshot of a crumbling marriage populated by sitcom characters, Adam Sandler plays John Clasky, an average man with an above-average life. With his burgeoning double chin always covered in a slight shadow of stubble, he’s a celebrated chef who runs his…
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…
