About two-thirds of the way through A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Chris Browne’s weirdly engaging documentary about professional bowling, the bad boy of the game, Pete Weber, looks straight into the camera and assures us: “I’m not an asshole.” Whether to believe Weber is an open question, given what we’ve…
A kind of criminal fairy tale, Benot Jacquot’s Tout de Suite recalls both the Godard New Wave classic Breathless and its American counterpart, Bonnie and Clyde. A restless rich girl named Lili (dramatically beautiful Isild Le Besco) takes up with a small-time Moroccan thief (Ouassini Embarek) after a botched bank…
So little time, so much trouble. In the 24-hour period that’s dissected in Heights, the first feature from Harvard/Cambridge/USC film-school-educated Chris Terrio, an aspiring Manhattan photographer named Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) gets cold feet about her upcoming marriage to a dull but pleasant lawyer named Jonathan (James Marsden); a needy Broadway…
He takes it. The gritty stoic wearing the dirty uniform and the tar-crusted batting helmet takes Kevin Brown’s 92-mile-an-hour fastball on the left forearm and, without so much as glancing back at the mound, takes his base. A week later, a wayward Pedro Astacio heater hits him flush in the…
Horror-movie cultists are in for a dark thrill this week when the 1945 British classic Dead of Night is shown in Boulder. Linked by the tale of an architect’s recurring nightmare, it’s a series of five supernatural episodes. Notable are the two directed by Alberto Cavalcanti — the first about…
Michael Wranovics’s well-meant documentary Up for Grabs, about the absurd legal battle over the ownership of the baseball Barry Bonds hit for his season-record 73rd home run back in 2001, is instantly overshadowed by other events: the steroids scandal, the allegations of Bonds’s apparent mistress, the possibility that his career…
Bizarre. Jerry Rice walks through the Broncos’ spring locker room, courteously introducing himself to teammates who were second-graders when he won the first of his three Super Bowl rings. It’s like Bruce Springsteen falling by to trade riffs with your kid’s garage band. Surreal. Rice announces, “Hi, I’m Jerry Rice”…
Jonathan Swift’s observation that satire is “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” almost certainly applies to moviemakers who ape the work of their peers with comic intent, as evidenced by a well-chosen selection of films on view in Boulder this week. Under…
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg — and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace — the battling Smiths of the title…
Ten new films from the Pacific Rim will be on view this week in the eighth edition of the Aurora Asian Film Festival. The four-day event is sponsored by the Denver Film Society, the Aurora Asian/Pacific Community Partnership and the City of Aurora. Festival highlights: Electric Shadows (China), director Xiao…
It had to compete for face time with the Indy 500, a Cubs-Rockies slugfest at Wrigley Field and the Memorial Day cookout in Uncle Elmer’s back yard. But the Colorado Crush’s first-ever home playoff game, against the San Jose SaberCats, drew a big enough (and loud enough) crowd Sunday afternoon…
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) includes plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…
If you’re trying to navigate the gulf between the absolutist view inside Fortress Bush and the relativist politics of Western Europe, you need go no further than Brothers, a provocative new drama from Denmark. Superficially, it’s an intimate and rather self-contained film, but director Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, The One…
Tod Browning’s Freaks, a bizarre glimpse into the world of the sideshow, has been the ultimate cult movie for more than seventy years. Talk about impeccable outlaw credentials: At a San Diego preview, a woman ran screaming from the theater; upon the film’s release, in 1932, many American exhibitors refused…
The Starz FilmCenter’s wide-ranging Global Lens 2005 series, which continues through May, features new films from such exotic climes as Uruguay, China, Turkey, Algeria, Bosnia, Mali and, if the rumors are true, North Dakota and Nebraska. This week, the two features on view will be Lili’s Apron, a comic parable…
Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So after getting a look at herself in her first movie in fifteen years, La…
Even staring-mad, orange-to-the-bone Broncos fans were snoozing through the third round of last month’s NFL draft when Mike Shanahan exploded a major bomb under their butts. Maurice Clarett! You gotta be kidding! Only a lunatic on crack would take a chance on the whiny, divisive ex-Ohio State running back. Talk…
Almost no one save Vladimir Putin and a few stubborn ex-Red Army generals laments the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the remnants of that vast failed experiment look more and more these days like items from Ripley’s Believe It or Not. That may be the spirit in which to…
Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Colosseum, or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…
One attraction of foreign films is the glimpse they provide of exotic lands. But after viewing a startling coming-of-age drama called Schizo, you probably won’t call the travel agent to book ten days in Kazakhstan. Or ten minutes. As revealed by first-time director Guka Omarova and cinematographer Khasanbek Kydyraliyev, this…
Agent Fox Mulder, the coolly instinctual sleuth of The X-Files, got pretty good at unraveling paranormal mysteries. If only the actor who played him were as adept at solving the riddle of his movie career. David Duchovny’s new vanity project, House of D, is the tortured tale of a thirteen-year-old…
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
