At first glance, it seems odd that French surrealist filmmaker Georges Franju began as a documentarian. But his non-fiction visit to a slaughterhouse (Le Sang des Betes, 1949) and his grim look at World War I relics (Hotel des Invalides, 1951) set the stage, in their way, for his later…
For those who pay no mind to Oprah, the dispute at the heart of House of Sand and Fog concerns the occupancy of a run-down little bungalow just inland from the Northern California coast. It’s not much of a place, really. And to get a glimpse of the Pacific, you’d…
Anthony Minghella’s magnificent film version of the Civil War epic Cold Mountain has much more going for it than Hollywood grandeur. Beyond its striking sets and gruesome battle scenes populated with thousands of extras, in addition to its movie-star glamour — Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are like lovely pieces…
The third Longmont Film Festival gets under way Thursday, December 18, with Ernst Lubitsch’s heartwarming 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner and continues through Saturday, December 20, with Billy Wilder’s favorite Some Like It Hot (recently acclaimed by the American Film Institute as the best Hollywood comedy ever made),…
Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie/film-fest crowd into enemy camps. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and dead-eye…
William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…
Most of us never come close to solving the great mysteries of life. You know: What’s a “Hoya”? Do Jesus and Mohammed get together for lunch? How does the washing machine know to take in four socks and give back only three? Where have the Bush twins gone? I mean…
As an alternative to the conventional wisdom emanating from the Pentagon and the White House, Robert Greenwald’s scalding documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War makes for powerful and provocative viewing. As an antidote to the notion that American patriotism consists, in toto, of endorsing any preemptive foreign…
On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took eleven passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…
Every year, Santa eats the cookies. Every year, Uncle Elmer overdoes it on the eggnog and lurches into the Christmas tree. And every year, good guy Everyman George Bailey painfully rediscovers the true value of his small-town life and then gathers family ’round the hearth and takes joy in his…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even a black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see…
That ominous rumble gaining volume in the mean saloons and unhappy living rooms of Denver is the sound of a citizen army being mustered. Taking up their cudgels as they pull on their predominantly orange flak jackets, these aroused militia-folk are clearly plotting an advance on Dove Valley, there to…
Director Jean-Luc Godard, once the enfant terrible of France’s New Wave, was never much known for his charm. The groundbreaking Breathless, made in 1959, was full of enchantments and innovations, but the later films of Godard’s most productive period, such as 1967’s La Chinoise and 1968’s Weekend, were seen by…
Five or six years ago, the Montreal Canadiens got around to sending Ralph Backstrom a chunky, diamond-encrusted gold ring to commemorate the six Stanley Cup championships the Habs won when he was a quick-skating, high-scoring center on the team, from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Backstrom cherishes the memento,…
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, a collection of ten new films that address social and political unrest in Rwanda, the Middle East, Chile and Bosnia, among other places, will screen November 13-16 at the Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli Building on the Auraria campus. Co-presented by Human Rights…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will probably end up as a mere footnote. The people who forge van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) more richly…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence, but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
Having seen the bright lights of Syracuse, New York, Carmelo Anthony thinks Denver is “a slow town.” But there’s nothing slow about the way long-suffering Nuggets fans are taking the smiling nineteen-year-old rookie into their hearts. “I don’t know about LeBron James,” season-ticket holder Vince Shaefer said after the Nugs’…
That crazy little girl hidden away behind a cold, white bedroom door in Georgetown, with her mouthful of pea soup and her patented 360-degree head-swivel trick, still has the power to scare the hell out of us, and she will do it again Friday, October 31, in Boulder. The Exorcist,…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hatred remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Richard Brooks’s brilliant adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967) remains one of the most chilling true-crime films ever made. The tale of two drifters whose disturbed personalities collide to produce their brutal mass murder of an ordinary farming family in Kansas and, in time, their double execution by…
That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine; that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers chose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz,…
