On the eve of a controversial war in Iraq, Stanley Kubrick’s superior black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Friday through Thursday at the Madstone Theaters at Tamarac Square) serves as both caution and comic relief. Since its release in 1964, this…
You can bet your portfolio — what’s left of it — that the makers of The Bank, an Australian techno thriller about a zillion-dollar stock-market scam, are counting on the vast ill will created by the Enron scandal, the WorldCom mess and the lesser offspring of corporate malfeasance to build…
This is a good year for Colorado tenor saxophonist and composer Fred Hess — and for jazz fans who appreciate harmonically adventurous cutting-edge music, impeccably played. Hess is releasing two new CDs on the Tapestry label this month — one recorded during a piano-less quartet date in Rochester, New York,…
It’s easy to see the subtle brilliance of Gene Hackman’s acting whenever we revisit modern classics such as The French Connection or The Conversation. This plain-faced master of character brings to the role of a grubby, dogged New York cop or a desolate surveillance expert all the low, discomfiting details…
Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are: the Top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery a few years later that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
Denver-based tenor saxophonist Keith Oxman has recorded four previous CDs for Tom Burns’s plucky, perennially underfunded Capri label, based in Bailey. But Brain Storm, Oxman’s first release in three years, signals perhaps the biggest leap forward for a player, composer and teacher (he directs East High School’s student big band)…
It’s strong stuff, especially at seven o’clock in the morning. Coach is unhappy with his players. Unhappy? Hey — to hear him rage, Coach is infuriated by his players, all-out disgusted by his players, and for 22 minutes he lets them have it with both barrels, like a drill sergeant…
Nicolas Roeg’s wonderfully tricky horror movie Don’t Look Now, set amid the crumbling splendor of Venice, was made in 1973; for three decades, it has attracted an ever-expanding cult intrigued by its grown-up frights and relentless eroticism. Madstone Theaters will screen Roeg’s occult thriller Friday and Saturday night at 9:30…
The late Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s near-legendary album Radio Nights, recorded live at New York’s old Half Note in 1967 and 1968 for radio broadcast, has long been hoarded by vinyl collectors. Now producer Joel Dorn has transferred this gem to CD on his new Hyena label. The nightclub mikes are…
Hey, Bleary Eyes. How you holdin’ up? For connoisseurs of tackle football, the final two weeks of the old year and the first month of the new always provide a festival of violent collision unrivaled by the morning rush hour on I-25 or the running of the bulls in Pamplona…
They’re both gone now, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder, but they leave behind the bittersweet legacy of such Hollywood gems as Some Like It Hot and Fortune Cookie. The best of all their collaborations, perhaps, is The Apartment (1960), in revival Friday, January 3, at the Starz FilmCenter. It’s a…
The long collaboration between the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his alter ego, actor Toshiro Mifune, was one of the most fruitful in all of film history: The ideal vessel for Kurosawa’s ideas and obsessions — from the definition of classic Samurai honor to modern man’s need for compassion…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The ribald Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version is likely to win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie…
Imagine a 264-pound panther with the grip of a power wrench, a chess master’s cunning and the smash-mouth instincts of a middle linebacker. Imagine him in a green U.S. Army uniform. Put it all together, and you’ve got Dremiel Byers — the best heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler on the planet. Never…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged from the mid-nineteenth-century cauldron of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats…
The Italian film director Luchino Visconti once said that the only thing that really counts on the screen is “an expression of the burden of being human.” Of all his work, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), which is showing in revival Friday through December 19 at the Starz FilmCenter,…
Each of the beautifully made vignettes that make up Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity glimpses a young woman caught at a crossroads, faced with an important decision and about to experience one of those rare dilations of vision that can change an entire life. Now, this is a common ploy in…
The other day, a man with Christmas on his mind walked into a sporting goods store to buy a baseball mitt for his son. “I’d like to buy a baseball mitt for my son,” he told the clerk. “Oh, yeah?” the clerk answered, giving his customer a narrow-eyed gaze. “How…
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) is rightly famous (and notorious) as the most powerful propaganda film ever made: a documentary account of the Nazis’ massive, staged-for-the-camera Nuremberg rallies of 1934. The film glorifies Adolf Hitler and propagates the myth of German “purity” so skillfully that to this day…
Once a fixture on the Denver jazz club scene, singer Lynn Skinner has been keeping her own counsel of late. But Gems in the Rough, a new, self-produced collaboration with guitarist Vonn Regensberger, reaffirms her gift as a versatile stylist with a voice as appealing as old brandy. The material…
John Ford’s beautifully crafted classic 1956 Western, The Searchers, opens Friday for a one-week run at Tamarac Square’s Madstone Theaters. This tale of a bitter Texan Civil War veteran named Ethan Edwards (ideally played by John Wayne) who undertakes a five-year search for a niece who’s been abducted by Indians…
While serving what he saw as a two-year sentence with the Colorado Rockies, pitcher Mike Hampton won 21 games and lost 28, complained endlessly about his misfortunes and collected more than $20 million from a team to which he contributed almost nothing. Now the pest has gotten his way and…
