In Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding, Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is a crooked New York cop firmly in the pocket of a Mafia don. He’s also cheating on his wife with a cocktail waitress, and when he’s assigned to hole up with a beautiful killer who’s turned state’s evidence, she seduces…
Given the gruesome effects of German mysticism on the twentieth century, it’s wise to regard any new form of it with suspicion. That includes the films of Wim Wenders, a thoroughly postwar German who seems to embrace both pacifist Euro-modernism and traditional Catholic theology. To be a German filmmaker in…
Wednesday February 2 Mambazo kings: The name is the first mystery, but it’s really very simple. Ladysmith refers to a South African township, black symbolizes the black ox, thought to be the strongest kind, and mambazo is an ax. Put that all together and you’ve got Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a…
Two new shows stretch the definition of the photograph as art while offering original and exciting visual experiences. Experimental Vision: The Evolution of the Photogram Since 1919, at the Denver Art Museum, tracks the long, fascinating history of cameraless photos, dubbed “photograms.” And Beyond Photography, at Emmanuel Gallery, skips past…
Caustic and brilliant, August Wilson nails down the realities of racism in his plays. They are as revealing, humane and in-your-face as they are graceful, funny and entertaining. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a masterful piece of theater, competently mounted and performed with moments…
The limousine liberals John Guare satirized in his Broadway hit Six Degrees of Separation are the same kind of New Yorkers Woody Allen seems so genuinely fond of…and so profoundly incapable of understanding. Installed in lavish Park Avenue apartments, these posers have a passing acquaintance with both intellectual fashions and…
John Madden’s Golden Gate, a romantic soap opera badly disguised as a fable of McCarthyite bigotry and good-guy guilt, features Matt Dillon as an eager-beaver FBI agent assigned to root out supposed communists in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1952, and Joan Chen as the beautiful daughter of an innocent Chinese…
Wednesday January 26 Childish pursuits: Author Jonathan Kellerman can say without reservation that it pays to write what you know. He used to be a practicing child psychologist, but now writes full time about the mystery adventures of fictional child psychologist Alex Delaware. Kellerman will be on hand for a…
When the theater “holds a mirror up to nature,” it’s not always a pretty sight. The nature reflected there is frail, cruel, stupid and cold as often as it is brave, kind, bright and sympathetic. But the reflection can order and analyze human experience, making it easier for us to…
The messages you get from the presidential campaign documentary The War Room are multiplying at an alarming rate. Clearly, the husband and wife team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Chris Hegedus meant it as a valentine to the efforts of candidate Bill Clinton’s smart-mouthed chief handler,…
Director Michael Apted has range. He’s made two dozen films for British television, the political documentary Incident at Oglala and five installments of his continuing 7 Up series, which has followed a group of disparate children, at seven-year intervals, to adulthood. Apted has also ventured into Hollywood features–notably the 1980…
Wednesday January 19 Artists about town: As if Joshua Hassel hasn’t already done his share for the fine arts in Denver–running top-notch shows at his Arte Vitale Gallery and all–now he’s taking it to the TV screen with Object of My Desire, a half-hour magazine-format program about local art and…
Most Denver art cooperatives celebrate the turn of the year with big group shows of members’ work. These exhibitions provide both an opportunity to party and a way to assess the year’s achievements on the “alternative” scene, offering an infrequent overview of a co-op’s talent and diversity. Last year the…
In the theater it is possible to weigh arguments–to present two sides of a debate and let the audience come to its own conclusions. In the movies, and almost always on TV, what you usually get is propaganda. Occasionally, a great film will come along that is open-ended enough to…
Civil liberties remain in short supply for the beleaguered Catholics of Northern Ireland, but filmmaker Jim Sheridan has taken the liberty of vividly dramatizing one of the most notorious instances of recent British tyranny. Let’s hope Prime Minister John Major and Parliament are watching–red-faced and thoughtful. With a passion reminiscent…
In the seniors division of the Buddy Movie Sweepstakes, you could scarcely ask for a classier pair of contenders than Robert Duvall and Richard Harris. Their resumes would daunt Moses, their pride in craft has never been more evident and in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway they both look like they’ve been…
Viola loves Orsino who loves Olivia who loves Viola (thinking her Cesario). The eternal triangle. Love does not come easy in Shakespeare’s plays: There’s always some piper or other to be paid, some complicated journey laid on the innocent by fate. But in the comedies, of course, fate’s jests always…
They sport red ribbons from the costume department and pass the hat at parties, but Hollywood’s glitterati know where their bread is buttered, and otherwise avoid the explosive AIDS issue. Even the studio advertising campaign for Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia is discreet and noncommital: You must read between the lines to…
Despite a director with a case of the shouts and a hopelessly miscast leading lady, that prince of players, Anthony Hopkins, can still make magic. Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands, a well-mannered tearjerker set at well-mannered Oxford in 1952, aspires to romantic tragedy and to the kind of Merchant/Ivory polish that keeps…
Everybody knows about instant photos–aim, shoot, and sixty seconds later a small square of photographic paper pops out and develops itself into an image of Aunt Rosie. Because there’s no negative, reprints, retouching and other arty effects aren’t possible: What you see is what you get. Even so, a number…
The intense love triangle at the heart of Chen Kaige’s sumptuous epic Farewell My Concubine could be the least of its concerns, but it’s not. As Rick Blaine told us, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” and it’s difficult…
Ever ready with a new theory, the social psychologists are saying that Western movies are making their current comeback because beleaguered Americans have a revived desire for law and order. Pin a star on an upright, fearless sheriff, let him clean the bad guys out of the local saloons, and…
