Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
The French are about as popular at the Pentagon this week as cat food on a croissant, but even the hawks would admit that the Gauls have made some wonderful movies. Among the most stylish and original is 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s bittersweet charmer about a clerk…
What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end, she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish Holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has…
If you have a taste for really vile, totally degenerate bad guys, the late John Frankenheimer’s neglected crime thriller 52 Pick-up may be the movie for you. Adapted in 1986 from one of Elmore Leonard’s more perverse potboilers, it’s a sleazy tale of sex and revenge in which a Los…
John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle-rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the spectacle. As Navy SEAL…
Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving adamantly to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place — to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be…
Long before director Jonathan Demme sent the bean counters reeling with box-office hits like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, he made one of the most energetic and engaging rock-concert films ever. Stop Making Sense, from 1984, stars David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and it’s a treat not…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
Apart from “I Am Fascinating” and/or “My Parents Are Horrid,” the reigning theme of film students’ movies is “Lovers Are Bonkers.” Thus, it comes as no surprise when a director’s first feature contains many elements that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever hung around a film school. So it…
The Fly does not loom large in the great scheme of things. It may not even rank high on the list of movies in which airborne objects — doomed dirigibles, hijacked 747s, Alfred Hitchcock’s assorted jays and starlings — play a major part. But director Kurt Neumann’s low-budget shocker has…
Right-wing pundits will be coming out of the woodwork to holler about this one. Bad enough, they’ll say, that The Life of David Gale attacks the death penalty; it also features a caricature Governor of Texas with big ears and a familiar, Scripture-quoting smirk. There’s a character who notes that…
Someone’s got to say it, so let’s start here: We’ve underestimated Will Ferrell. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard to do. His Saturday Night Live stint was never hugely impressive, as he’d often fall back on the same shtick of yelling his lines with detailed enunciation in a passive-aggressive tone that…
Colorado Springs is certainly not the first place that comes to mind when you think “avant-garde.” But Christopher May, the founder and primary curator of that city’s International Experimental Cinema Exposition, may have found a filmmaker who reconciles conservative values and artistic ferment. At 8 p.m. Saturday, Frank Biesendorfer will…
Anybody who’s cracked open a recent Disney G-rated DVD has probably witnessed the ultimate in sequelmania. On the Lilo & Stitch release, for instance, the feature was preceded — skippably, thank God — by Inspector Gadget 2, trailers for The Jungle Book 2, Atlantis 2: Milo’s Return, 101 Dalmatians II:…
From the ashes of the late Denver Jazz on Film Festival rises the Denver Jazz on Film Series, a slightly shorter — but no less syncopated — bow to a great American art form as interpreted by moviemakers around the world. The series, which features twelve films ranging from a…
The first feature film by 34-year-old Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Intacto, is a complex meditation on luck, fate and the torments of memory. It has some opaque moments, and once in a while it gives off a whiff of film-school pretension. But the young Spaniard looks like a force…
Virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, but the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American has now been made into a disturbing and…
In the 1970s, director Werner Herzog helped energize West Germany’s film renaissance with a brilliant variety of personal visions — a condemnation of the Spanish conquistadors and imperialism in general (Aguirre, the Wrath of God); a semi-obscene parody of everyday life enacted by dwarfs (Even Dwarfs Started Small); and a…
You can bet your portfolio — what’s left of it — that the makers of The Bank, an Australian techno thriller about a zillion-dollar stock-market scam, are counting on the vast ill will created by the Enron scandal, the WorldCom mess and the lesser offspring of corporate malfeasance to build…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the twelve- to eighteen-year-old demographic hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel before the official sequel’s release this…
On the eve of a controversial war in Iraq, Stanley Kubrick’s superior black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Friday through Thursday at the Madstone Theaters at Tamarac Square) serves as both caution and comic relief. Since its release in 1964, this…
