Any jazz pianist with the courage to record solo deserves our respect. Sans bassist and drummer, he stands naked, as vulnerable as a stand-up comic or a wire-walker who’s thrown aside his net. If the soloist also happens to be an elegant classicist who combines the dazzle of Chick Corea…
The powerful brand of political muckraking pioneered in the 1960s by the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras has largely fallen from favor, replaced by the sloppy, self-serving outbursts of oafs like Michael Moore. An opponent of tyranny in any form and under any flag, Costa-Gavras indicted right-wing Greek militarism in his…
Bobby DeGeorge saw his first Opening Day in 1954, at the age of nine, when his father took him and his brother to New York’s fabled Polo Grounds to watch the Giants play Pittsburgh. DeGeorge doesn’t remember who won. He doesn’t remember what his hero, Willie Mays, just back from…
You can be sure of one thing: None of the Hollywood glitterati who, on the advice of their agents, obscured their cleavages and kept their politics under their hats at this year’s supposedly war-dampened Academy Awards orgy have seen two minutes’ worth of the short films that were nominated for…
Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, movie-goers and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas or a…
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…
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…
Science is a beautiful thing, as any ballplayer with a snootful of ephedra can tell you. Combine the vigor of deep thinking with the dynamics of a free marketplace and there’s no breakthrough our researchers can’t achieve — from genetically altered Brussels sprouts to video games that simulate a nuclear…
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…
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…
He may be on the verge of mid-career, but Ron Miles is still having growth spurts, as any good artist must. The Denver trumpeter’s compelling new collection of seven originals, Laughing Barrel, deploys a full-throated quartet to some vivid new regions of the jazz frontier, and none of the players…
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…
Three guys walk into a bar: a shortstop, an outfielder and a pitcher. “What’ll ya have?” the bartender asks. The shortstop is the first to reply. “I’m gonna have a great season,” he says. “I’m gonna have the kind of season where I scoop up every rocket hit within fifteen…
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…
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…
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…
Trumpeter/flugelhornist Brad Upton prefers contemplation to fireworks, and his new release, Dragon, recorded in Boulder in May 2001, reveals a musician deep inside his thoughts. Of the eight Upton originals collected on the disc, four are dedicated to Buddhist teachers important in his spiritual life, one is for his eighteen-year-old…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If the president and CEO really wanted to please his 17,483 shareholders Sunday afternoon — and we know he did — he might have jumped up from his luxury box with four minutes to play. Amid a huge burst of fireworks and a brain-numbing blast of heavy metal, he might…
