Flick Pick

After more than 400 books, countless TV documentaries and half a dozen movies, can the huge, untidy pile of dark speculations about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination support one more theory? Writer/director Neil Burger thinks so. Shot with a hand-held camera in jittery mock-doc style, Interview With the Assassin (opening…

Kevin Klean

Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge from the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor¹s Club, the notion remains alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that the…

Flick Pick

Movie buffs who are in the mood for a little blood, deceit and darkness need look no further than this week’s second annual Longmont Film Festival, which presents three film noir classics Thursday and Friday at the Longmont Performing Arts Center, 513 Main Street. At 7 p.m. Thursday, Colorado Public…

Nuggets, No Glory

Twenty Things to Do at a Denver Nuggets Game: 1. Contemplate Bad Omen No. 1. Before the season even started, star forward Juwan Howard, who is the league’s fourth-highest-paid player, at $20.6 million per year, was suspended for two games after going ballistic in a pre-season contest and trying to…

Caveman’s Valentine

The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down cleavages, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…

Drowning in Water

Consider life’s unbreakable rules: Send Mom flowers on her birthday. Keep your fastball down. Never order lasagna in Des Moines. Don’t go sailing with people you can’t stand. Violation of this last rule has yielded some pretty fair books and movies over the years — Moby Dick and The Caine…

Hit Pick

In his long career, the ageless tenor saxophonist, bandstand wit and sometimes blues singer Billy Tolles has occasionally hit the road with stars like Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. But for the most part, “B.T.” has been a solid local performer and educator who’s firmed up Denver’s jazz…

Baseball’s Treasured Orb

When I was a kid, my father had a friend named Morris Kleinman, an elegant, witty lawyer with a passion for tailor-made suits, Bombay martinis on the stem and the New York Yankees. Renowned as a tiger in the courtroom, Mr. Kleinman was an indulgent and generous man outside the…

Other People’s Life Shines

For American moviegoers with a blood lust for organized crime, the Boss of all Bosses has long been named Corleone. Is it Vito? Or Michael? That’s a matter of personal preference. In any event, so beloved and enduring are the Godfather films — the first and second, anyway — that…

Ready for Takeoff

Their amazing quarterback stands 5′ 11″ and weighs 185 — which makes him three inches taller and ten pounds heavier than their top running back. They call older men “sir,” get straight A’s in calculus and would no sooner cheap-shot an opponent than fly a Mig for Iraq. In the…

Silver Anniversary

For more than two decades, Ron Henderson has been the heart and soul of the Denver International Film Festival — shepherd and shill, house philosopher and dogged troubleshooter. A publicity volunteer in year one and the festival’s director since 1981, he’s coaxed cash out of tight-fisted bankers, discovered cinematic masterpieces…

Rolling Out the Starz

Wear something silver. The 25th Starz Denver International Film Festival starts Thursday night at the Buell Theatre with White Oleander, Peter Kosminsky’s study of a girl’s harrowing journey through a series of L.A. foster homes; it will close ten days later at the Buell Theatre with Bowling for Columbine, political…

Heaven Help Us

The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary — which should know better — defines “baseball” as “a game played with a wooden bat and a hard ball by two teams of nine players each…the object of the game being to make as many runs as possible within nine innings of…

Homies

Chris Smith’s brief but thoroughly entertaining Home Movie carries on a grand tradition of American documentary: seeking out the eccentrics and contrarians among us. In the space of an hour, Smith provides glimpses of five U.S. houses and their owners, and — thank goodness — his whirlwind tour is less…

Rez Stop

Whatever white America doesn’t know — or refuses to acknowledge — about the grim realities of life on the nation’s Indian reservations has been coming to light through a growing body of Native American writing and the long-overdue emergence of films shot on location in Indian country, using largely indigenous…

Curl Up and Die

For most of us living west of New Brunswick and south of Saskatchewan, Canadian humor and curling are both acquired tastes. But that hasn’t stopped the Calgary-born actor, writer and director Paul Gross and Artisan Entertainment from releasing an odd duck of a movie called Men With Brooms in such…

Football Fanatics, Arise

Now that football season has kicked us in the butt and the state’s major teams, with the exception of Colorado’s Buffaloes, have jumped out to good starts, it’s time for readers to test their knowledge of local gridiron history — and to predict the future. Herewith the Official Colorado Football…

CART Blanch

For true believers like Simon Hanley, the sting of burning methanol in the nostrils is akin to holy incense and the deafening screech of 800-horsepower engines is the music of the spheres. With the possible exception of bullfighting and warfare, no sport intoxicates its fans like big-time auto racing, and…

Ultra-Violence

Any young movie director seeking to make a mark in the underworld gravitates to certain conventions of the crime genre. Major bloodletting is a must. It doesn’t hurt to stage a power struggle between an established mob boss and his overly ambitious protégé, preferably with undertones of Greek tragedy. There…

Keeping Secrets

Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes. It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…

A Mind’s Coda

Between the onset of Greta Garbo’s tuberculosis and the victory over Russell Crowe’s schizophrenia, moviegoers have endured a relentless barrage of disease — and they have relished almost every tearjerking, Kleenex-wringing minute of it. Who but a soulless curmudgeon could resist the emotion (no matter how manufactured) of Ali McGraw’s…

A Norse Odd Couple

As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Naess’s touching social comedy, Elling, are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…