Unless smiled upon by the pooh-bahs of PBS or the lords of cable, the makers of most short films are doomed to obscurity — at least in this country. Even the lucky ones can expect little more than a hard-earned glimpse at the odd film festival, followed by orphanhood. Thank…

Mainstream American audiences are most familiar with the U.S.-made films of the late Louis Malle — including the sensual New Orleans period piece Pretty Baby and the moody Burt Lancaster vehicle Atlantic City. But before Hollywood came calling, Malle was one of the most prominent directors in his native France,…

Penguins, shmenguins. If you want some new insight into the codes of animal behavior, have a look at Eight Below, an inspirational adventure in which a team of sled dogs marooned in Antarctica fights to survive winter without benefit of man or Milk-Bone. In the process, the intrepid furry heroes…

The tenth Denver Jewish Film Festival gets under way Thursday, February 9, with a 7:30 p.m. showing of Isn¹t This a Time!, a high-spirited concert documentary honoring legendary music promoter and social activist Harold Leventhal. On-screen performers include Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Theodore Bikel and…

This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond, or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is…

Jessica Sanders’s disturbing documentary After Innocence (Special Jury Prize winner at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival) tackles a hot topic: prison inmates, some of them in jail for more than two decades, who are subsequently found to be wrongly convicted and released back into society with little or no support…

Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing might be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of…

The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’s period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…

What better time to hear the views of actual American combat soldiers rather than the rhetoric of the politicians who send them to war? In Boulder this week, three eye-opening documentaries — including one that’s rarely been seen since its 1972 release — will give voice to what the Pentagon…

There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait till you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…

With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant-Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period…

No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…

Jets or Sharks? Schwarzenegger or Stallone? Welles or Hitchcock? Such trifles pale next to the real heavyweight championship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. In a stroke of sheer genius, organizers of the Denver Public Library Film Series will now renew the great debate with a series of six films…

We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…

Over the centuries, the legend of Tristram and Iseult has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner’s operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets…

Over the years, movie-goers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle: Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn; Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame; Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed; the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies. As…

What’s an unemployed former super-spy to do? Faced with a midlife career change, suave Pierce Brosnan seems to have chosen wry self-mockery, reinventing himself as a scruffy, fallen James Bond surrogate, sometimes still furnished with a license to kill and a certain gift for cool, but far more likely now…

Dennis Gansel’s disturbing feature Before the Fall explores a little-known detail of the Nazi horror: the recruitment of more than 15,000 young men (and some girls) into elite training schools called “Napolas,” where they were groomed as athletes, soldiers and “ideologically correct” scholars. “These youths,” Adolf Hitler proclaimed in 1938,…

Unless your new plasma TV is the size of a conference table, it’s a good idea to skip the DVD option and make straight for a movie theater to take in Lawrence of Arabia. The deepest pleasure of David Lean’s 1962 classic — all 227 minutes of it in the…

The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…

The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don’t feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun With Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey’s tireless antics — slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and…