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,…
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…
