Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama. The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in…
Thursday October 2 Lions and tigers and hippos: While the highfalutin’ crowd packs Cirque du Soleil’s LoDo big top this month for swanky circus fare, the rest of us can simply experience the Greatest Show on Earth. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus–featuring old-fashioned carnival attractions such as…
R. Craig Miller, curator of the Architecture, Design and Graphics department at the Denver Art Museum, is out of step with the current trend in curating–and thank goodness for that. Too many curators today dispense with such inconvenient details as history and style, relying instead on their own instincts and…
If you’re like most people, chances are there’s a situation from your past, oft-told at small gatherings, that has always seemed worthy to you of dramatization. “After all,” you say to yourself after having regaled a cozy audience of acquaintances with your oddly funny, slightly embellished tale, “people keep telling…
“I want to yell things in newspapers,” one character says in Leslie Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians. The granddaughter of a prominent minister who fled his native Armenia for freedom in America, she intends to tell anyone who will listen that her people’s suffering–which remains palpable today–has been ignored by humankind…
The fact that director Gary Fleder imposed the dismal Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead on Denver and the world is no good reason to kick his next movie in the butt. There are plenty of other reasons. For one, Kiss the Girls is a movie about a…
The adventurous moviegoer who doesn’t mind wrestling with a little bafflement will probably find many things to admire in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence–not least its coolly ironic title, the Germanic vigor with which it seeks to whip the causes, effects and flagrant merchandising of violence into a heady…
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act so much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script as much as his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of someone who’s always this far…
Thursday September 25 Novel ideas: The last time author Lisa See came through these parts, it was to promote On Gold Mountain, a fascinating history/memoir of her multiracial Chinese-American family. With that story out of the way, See has switched over to fiction, and she should do just fine, considering…
It’s no surprise that the name Arthur Szyk is unfamiliar. And not just because of all those consonants. First, Szyk’s chosen forms of expression–miniature painting, illustration and illumination–are hardly the kinds of things that lead to fame and fortune. Then there’s the fact that, instead of working in some modern…
By the time the curtain falls on David Mamet’s Oleanna, you’re likely to have changed your mind several times about whose side is more “right” in the two-character drama. You’re also bound to gain new insight into a misunderstood, sometimes-maligned playwright. To begin with, the play examines political correctness, sexual…
Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…
Small world, Hollywood. So damnably small (if not downright small-minded) that producers half-crazed by designer-brand seltzer and rampant profit motive are now starting to lift concepts for entire movies from the acceptance speeches of Academy Award winners. Case in point: The moment Scott Rudin, who’s downloaded truckloads of cash from…
Okay. Drop a billionaire know-it-all, a cocky fashion photographer and a slavering Kodiak bear into the Alaskan wilderness and tell ’em to fight it out. The smart money would be on the bear (he knows the territory), but because the perpetrators of The Edge profess to be more interested in…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
Thursday September 18 Nothing but the blues: One of the best blues lineups you’ll experience in these parts will turn all of Boulder into a non-stop boogie parlor this weekend. The three-day Boulder Blues Festival festival comes in with a roar tonight at 8 when Chicago blues veteran Son Seals…
Comics and the fine arts have overlapped “back as far as Hogarth,” muses Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art director Cydney Payton. “Maybe even further back,” chimes in Barbara Shark, chairman of the BMoCA board. Payton and Shark are talking about the show they co-organized, Art and Provocation (Images From Rebels),…
Plays about the theater have enjoyed a healthy success for at least 2,500 years, ever since Greek dramas were followed on the day’s bill of fare by comedies that made fun of the serious action preceding them. Somehow, audiences never tire of listening to the lamentations of people paid to…
A few years from now, an enterprising promoter is going to reap a considerable fortune repackaging the hits of, say, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lyle Lovett. But the show won’t be sold to American audiences by sending it out on the usual concert circuit. Nor will it seize its target…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations and the morgues, is fetishistic. The post-war L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see…
Every film adaptation of a pre-existing work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book was…
In Jonathan Nossiter’s brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power…
