It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk-radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for comparing…
Once in a while, a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
As the Columbia Pictures logo looms large on the screen until its torch becomes the focal point, we find ourselves in what appears to be a tent full of sweaty medieval warriors forging axes. We have to wonder: Did they already make another Scorpion King movie and not tell us?…
Norma Desmond would love it. This summer, the Chautauqua Silent Film Series will once more bring to Boulder a broad array of classics from Hollywood’s silent era, along with a touch of vintage Fritz Lang, complete with live musical accompaniment. If some rude blabbermouth in the row behind you disturbs…
He’s twelve feet tall. He’s ripped. He’s quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit to a dull green glow by his fury, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But as art-house director…
The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teenager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes — the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff…
Cult director Trent Harris, whose bizarre and challenging films have thrilled cutting-edge cineasts the world over, will appear in person Friday and Saturday nights as a guest of the International Film Series at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Harris will screen two of his most renowned works, Beaver Trilogy…
The most compelling characters in Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch’s vivid, eye-opening documentary Spellbound are not the film’s geeky, often bewildered twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, who find themselves shoved into the spotlight at the National Spelling Bee, but the overbearing, variously motivated parents who do the shoving. The film has generally…
There is a new movie out. It is called Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. It is a prequel to the 1994 movie by Peter and Bobby Farrelly called Dumb and Dumber. In that movie, Harry was played by Jeff Daniels. Lloyd was played by Jim Carrey. Parts of…
Mel Brooks’s none-too-funny parody of Star Wars, 1987’s Spaceballs, was released at the low ebb of the great comedian’s career. Two of Brooks’s most inventive movie hits, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, were already ancient history, buried back in the 1970s chapter of his life, and Broadway wouldn’t reinvent the…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy: an oil change and a tuneup. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The…
The French government should officially proclaim actor Jean Rochefort a national treasure. A fixture of Gallic cinema for five decades, he is best known to American audiences for his comedic turns in such sex farces as Pardon Mon Affaire and The Closet, and, of course, his near-miss as Don Quixote…
Once the enfant terrible of post-war German cinema, the single-minded director Werner Herzog made half a dozen great films in the 1970s, including Fata Morgana, Every Man for Himself and God Against All and his chilling update on F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, the Vampyre. But Herzog’s most memorable (and most characteristic)…
Preston Sturges, probably the wittiest writer and most nimble director of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Comedy, gave us such Depression-era classics as Sullivan’s Travels, The Great McGinty and The Lady Eve. Less well-known but just as uproarious, in its way, 1947’s quirky The Sin of Harold Diddlebock stars an aging…
If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disney-folk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
The teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy. In…
A lot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie…
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time,” but I can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’s laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’s toxic sugar till it’s just a bittersweet…
Time was that Dad stuffed the Mercury full of eager children (including, perhaps, one or two secreted in the trunk) and motored off to the drive-in for a double feature and a double order of corn dogs. Alas, the drive-in movie, with a few exceptions, is as dead as James…
A startling new film from Iran, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City, gives American viewers a rare and vivid glimpse of day-to-day life in contemporary Tehran — altering some of the politically based preconceptions we may have about the place and opening our eyes to a society that…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials here and in Peru blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere — if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Bros. and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded — the…
