Jerry Bruckheimer has always insisted that he cares less about critical acclaim than commercial appeal. “We make movies for the common man,” he said almost three years ago, as Black Hawk Down was crash-landing in theaters. “The pictures that I’ve made over the last twenty years or so have been…
Penek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, released last summer, takes the notion of the Odd Couple to dizzyingly philosophical heights, while the director, who earlier gave us the ingenious musical Mon-Rak Transistor (2001), speculates on time, space and narrative itself. The seemingly mismatched pair here are a meek Japanese…
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…
The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it — man, woman or household pet — is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek’s costume changes. After an opening sequence in Los Angeles,…
Most articles written about The Polar Express have focused on its groundbreaking technology, which takes the process used to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings one step further. Much as Andy Serkis’s performance was digitally mapped and reproduced via CGI, so, too, is Tom Hanks computer generated here…
A week after having seen Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains except for some scribblings in my notepad — such is the slight nature of this woeful, forgettable sequel. Squandering the goodwill that lingers from the original — now a beloved relic among the singletons…
The punk-hipster appeal of filmmaker Jim Van Bebber is based on half a dozen lurid, no-budget gorefests like My Sweet Satan, in which a suicidal teenager gets strung out on dope and starts worshipping the devil, and Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin, whose maniacal protagonist insists on scraping…
Mes Petits Amis. As part of Denver’s “Month of Photography,” Capsule at Pod is presenting Mes Petits Amis (My Little Friends), a solo featuring experimental images by emerging artist Katie Taft. Though she’s only been exhibiting in the area for the last year or so, she’s really gotten around. Her…
When shot with verve and skill, so that you can feel the heat and passion of the moment, a concert film is the next best thing to being there. That’s the way it is with Lightning in a Bottle, a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that captures an extraordinary evening in February…
Writer-director Charles Shyer’s Alfie is less a remake of the 1966 film that made Michael Caine a star than it is a retooling that softens the horrific blows struck by the original; it’s sweeter, too, cotton candy spun from decades-old arsenic. The original, written by Bill Naughton (who also penned…
Since its initial publication in 1986, myriad filmmakers have attempted — in vain — to film the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic book Watchmen, in which costumed superheroes have been outlawed and are being summarily exiled and executed by an unknown baddie. At the moment, Darren Aronofsky (Pi) is…
The talented documentarians Albert and David Maysles, both of whom studied psychology at college, were always at their best when addressing offbeat subjects: door-to-door Bible salesmen; a pair of eccentric Jackie Kennedy relatives living in a decrepit mansion on Long Island; the self-absorbed writer Truman Capote; the climate of violence…
Far Afield, et al. The Robischon Gallery is one of many area venues participating in the so-called Month of Photography, which is being held in conjunction with the Southwestern Regional Conference of the Society for Photographic Education, in town October 15 through 17. For its part of the festivities, Robischon…
The agony and the ecstasy of Ray Charles’s long journey cry out for a grittier, more direct movie than Taylor Hackford’s Ray — a movie that’s less processed and less outwardly opulent than this one. For much of these two hours and forty minutes, there’s almost no stylistic syncopation, aural…
Margo Channing cracked wiser. And her devious protegé cooked up better schemes to steal the limelight. Still, half a century after they lit up the screen, the principals in All About Eve would probably get a charge out of Being Julia. This bittersweet backstage drama skillfully combines — as all…
How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…
It takes mighty big stones to name your horror movie Saw, knowing full well that that’s popular fan-slang for Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie worshiped by gorehounds worldwide. When you take that name for your own, you had damn well better deliver a memorable, worthy contender to the…
The late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was an artist of sublime gift and burning conscience. His peerless series of meditations on the Ten Commandments, The Decalogue, will endure for as long as we remember movies; the sum of his work is as compelling as that of any director of the…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and The Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi, but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory, Ghost…
Let’s just get the term out of the way up front: It’s “fag hag” — and a thousand pardons, sensitive readers, but there is no PC equivalent. The new film Stage Beauty is an absolute fag-hag fiesta. Beneath its historical leanings and classic veneer, it’s utterly gaga for girls who…
In the mood for a double dose of low-camp spine-tingle? The Denver Art Museum’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater series will unspool an unashamedly low-budget, high-entertainment-value double feature early next week, just in time for Halloween. British director Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) has a suitably ghoulish title, for…
