In Coastlines, the final installment of director Victor Nunez’s “Panhandle Trilogy,” a wary ex-con named Sonny Mann (Timothy Olyphant) returns to his fly-bitten Florida home town to collect the debt that’s owed him for taking the fall in a drug deal gone wrong. But the slippery local crime lords (William…

Mel Brooks, the goofy great mind behind Broadway’s comic smash The Producers, may never direct another movie — the poor guy’s eighty years old, after all — but that’s okay, as long as we get to watch Young Frankenstein once in a while. The masterpiece of the Brooksian ouevre, this…

Long before Steven Spielberg tackled the horrors of Nazi Germany or set out to save Private Ryan, he came up with the most captivating fish story since Moby-Dick. To be fair, pop novelist Peter Benchley made his own fair-sized contribution to the Jaws phenomenon, but it was Spielberg who transformed…

The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead and — this just in — the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like…

A new interpretation of Macbeth, filmed in Denver and the mountains west of Golden and set in contemporary corporate America, will have its world premiere on Friday, May 19, at Starz FilmCenter. The first feature produced by Commerce City-based Ionogen Studios, this Macbeth stars Clyde Sacks in the title role…

If that plucky seeker of bliss Bridget Jones lived in the Czech Republic, she might be something like Laura (Zuzana Kanoczova), the 23-year-old heroine of Filip Renc’s spirited comedy From Subway With Love. When Laura discovers that the billboards on her commuter train have been replaced by overheated love letters…

The lovable hero of Goal! The Dream Begins is the kind of guy some Americans don’t find very appealing these days — a Mexican immigrant who’s trying to make a better life in East Los Angeles. Little matter that young Santiago Muñez (Kuno Becker) busts his butt working two crappy…

Among Warners Brothers’ classic gangster movies, the post-war gem White Heat (1949) may outrank even Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Scarface, thanks in large part to aging James Cagney’s spectacular performance as a psychopath who has such a thing for his sour, hard-bitten mother…

If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta’s Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta’s sets and threatening her life. Eventually, the filmmaker moved her…

World-weary skeptics might be tempted to pass on Icíar Bollaín’s Take My Eyes the moment they learn its heroine is yet another victim of domestic violence. But that would be a mistake. The brilliant Spanish filmmaker who directed and co-wrote this harrowing look at a sick marriage has no interest…

The impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…

The second Central and East European Film Festival gets under way on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus Monday, April 24, with a program called “Reading Between the Lines: Subversive Films Banned Under Repressive Regimes,” with screenings of Milos Forman’s classic 1967 satire from Czechoslovakia, The Fireman’s Ball, and Juliusz…

Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel, The Celestine Prophecy, has been a bulwark of new-age metaphysics since it first hit the bestseller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in print,…

Tired of the same old multiplex? Last Friday, the Harkins Northfield 18 at Stapleton opened for business, offering Denver movie-goers the largest single screen in the state and a sound system that rivals the most muscled-up rock-concert venue. The centerpiece of the new eighteen-theater house is something called the Cine…

The raunchy cult favorite Unholy Rollers (1972) features gorgeous Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings as the rebellious star of a Roller Derby team that’s amply stocked with resentful teammates and bitter rivalries. The heroine’s good looks and singleminded pursuit of fame make her a target at every game, and it isn’t…

Balletomanes are bound to adore Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s lavish documentary Ballets Russes (2005), which recalls the glory days of that legendary emigré dance troupe through rare footage of its opulent performances and interviews drawn from a 2000 reunion of its surviving stars, most of them in their eighties…

Through the Fire (Disney) He’s averaging just nine points in his second season for the Portland Trail Blazers, but considering where he came from and what he’s overcome, Sebastian Telfair is doing just fine, thank you. Jonathan Hock’s fascinating documentary takes us back to the young New York basketball legend’s…

Get out the whetstone and the blade, kids. Two of the most extreme Japanese samurai movies ever made are headed (or beheaded) for Boulder this weekend. Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword of Doom (1966) stars the brooding Tatsuya Nakadai as a sociopathic swordsman bereft of scruple, compassion or code — a new…

Kevin Willmott’s satirical fantasy, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, embraces the fictions that the South won the Civil War (better make that “the War of Northern Aggression”), that disgraced Abraham Lincoln fled to Canada (so did Thoreau, Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe), that slavery now exists in all fifty…

It’s hard to imagine President Dwight D. Eisenhower shackled in a cage at Guantanamo Bay. But if Ike were around today to say what he said in 1961 in his famous farewell speech to the nation, the radical nationalists of the Bush administration would surely not take kindly to it…

Financed on a budget of just $500,000 (by San Diego Chargers owner Alex Spanos) and produced by a skeleton crew of four young filmmakers, a new World War II documentary called The 11th Day is earning attention and provoking amazement as it quietly makes its way around the country without…

For a while there, Mel Brooks made a fine career out of satirizing Hollywood itself, taking dead aim at Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers, classic Westerns and, most hilariously, the Frankenstein franchise. Spaceballs, released in 1987, arrived just in time for the tenth anniversary of the first Star Wars blockbuster. If…