In a moment of candor, the hard-knocking jockey Sonny Werkman once said of his trade: “Two things there ain’t in this world: lady hookers and gentleman jockeys.” Old racetrackers claim that Sonny was pretty good at getting a balky filly to go seven furlongs against her will, even a mile,…
This year’s North American tour of The Animation Show, opening Wednesday, October 22, and running through Friday, October 24, as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, features a collection of award-winning animated shorts from eight countries. They were chosen by the co-producers, Academy Award nominee Don Hertzfeldt…
The six vivid women thrown together by fate in John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys are frequently divided by their bickering, but they are united in a deep common yearning — and of that Sayles has made an observant and provocative drama about the ambiguities of adult life and the…
This year’s Starz Denver International Film Festival, which opens Thursday, October 9, with the new Anthony Hopkins-Nicole Kidman drama, The Human Stain, and runs through Sunday, October 19, will feature more than 130 films and dozens of in-person appearances by notable actors and directors. The most buzzworthy event, booked at…
In case the stunning French documentary Winged Migration somehow flew right by you during its long and fruitful run at the Mayan, you can still catch it on the giant IMAX screen at United Artists’ Colorado Center, I-25 and Colorado Boulevard. Shooting over three years on all seven continents, director…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenerian hero of the sublime Czech tragicomedy Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he sniffs to the obsequious sales agent at…
From the beginning, we are instructed by our parents, teachers and clergyfolk not to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Never snicker at the girl who stutters, the boy who cannot catch the softball or, a little later, the poor classmate bewildered by algebra. In adulthood, do not ridicule…
In the Starz FilmCenter’s “Language of Film” series, which starts on Tuesday, October 7, Denver filmmaker Alexandre Philippe will examine three great films from a storyteller’s point of view, deconstructing narrative to reveal what he calls the movies’ “hidden anatomy.” Certainly, he will have superb material to work with. On…
The blood-spattered French thriller Demonlover offers about as blunt an indictment of international business culture as you’ll see in any movie. With a dedication that borders on mania, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Les Destinees) attacks what he sees as the greed, ruthless ambition and Byzantine chicanery lurking behind high-powered…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
If Patrick Roy isn’t muttering into his onion soup about now up in chilly Quebec, he probably should be. After that ignominious early exit from the playoffs last spring — the Minnesota Wild? the what? — the future suddenly looked bleak for the Colorado Avalanche. Not only was Roy, the…
Devotees of grim drama and great acting are in for a treat this Saturday, September 20, when the 1964 British classic The Pumpkin Eater screens at the Tattered Cover Free Film Series at the Starz FilmCenter. Adapted from a best-selling novel of the day by Penelope Mortimer, it features Anne…
If your name ends in a vowel and your people came over in steerage a hundred years ago, you will almost certainly find yourself in the kitchen these days, wooden spoon in hand, plum tomatoes draining in the colander, thoughts drifting between sweet nostalgia and the malaise of indefinable loss…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern-fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is dynamite;…
Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is not just one of the world’s great fantasists; he’s one of the most painterly filmmakers alive, and a vivid thinker who revels in taking chances with moods and spells and narrative experiments. Princess Mononoke was the first Miyazaki film to enjoy great acclaim in America,…
Many observant Jews in Israel and America are outraged by writer-director Eitan Gorlin’s brash first feature, The Holy Land, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not every day you encounter a film about an uncertain rabbinical student who falls in love with a Russian prostitute — in the holy…
Four years later, the Columbine massacre (and school shootings elsewhere) leaves more questions unanswered than resolved, despite the relentless efforts of psychiatrists, social commentators of every political stripe and baffled law-enforcement officers to explain them. In his remarkable first feature film, Home Room, writer-director Paul F. Ryan declines to analyze…
You know it. I know it. Every figure skater in Moscow knows it. Eleven high school kids coached by their home-ec teacher could beat the lowly Cincinnati Bengals. So that 30-10 road win your Denver Broncos put on the books Sunday afternoon doesn’t mean a thing. The first real tests…
Talk about weird cinematic experiences: The German department at Colorado College is presenting a series of ten Third Reich-era films this fall under the rubric “Between Entertainment and Propaganda: Popular German Films of the 1930s.” These largely forgotten works all come from the so-called Gleichschaultung period (1933-39), when Adolf Hitler…
Strange as it sounds, political theorists and trained economists may get an even bigger charge out of Tycoon: A New Russian than admirers of great movies like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, which chronicle the rise and fall of ambitious men. Directed by Pavel Lounguine from a barely fictionalized novel…
Hollywood has always been an easy target, especially when it turns the gun on itself. The makers of New Suit, a new wiseass movie-industry satire, include a French director, Francois Velle, who never has made a U.S. film until now, and a young screenwriter, Craig Sherman, whose most notable previous…
Get the lawn chairs folded, the picnic basket stuffed with goodies and the kids firmly in tow. The last film of the summer in the ultra-popular Boulder Outdoor Cinema series will be screened this Saturday night, August 30. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is not just for…
