George Karl, the Wizard of Westdenver, will get a little breather next weekend when the NBA All-Stars come to town. That’s because none of the delinquents in his just-founded reform school — not Carmelo Anthony, not Kenyon Martin, not Marcus Camby — got enough votes to earn a roster spot…
The thirteenth annual Black History Month Film & Video Festival this weekend will feature two films by the renowned Mexican documentarian Rafael R. Corona, as well as a 29-minute look at a late, lamented African-American bookstore here in Denver and a piece on the plight of Haitians as seen by…
When we first see Tony Fingleton, the plucky Australian hero of Swimming Upstream, he’s a cute little guy getting cuffed around by his vile big brother, Harold Jr. That’s just the beginning of a long ordeal. For the next two hours of screen time, Tony (played as a teenager by…
Last fall, the Swiss-French, Denver-based director Alexandre O. Philippe completed a profoundly weird and wonderfully engaging documentary called Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water — a vivid look at the quirky obsessions of members of something called the Klingon Language Institute. For those who have confined their travels, real and…
With all due respect to the barbecue kings who enlivened The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a pair of deranged Danes called The Green Butchers would likely win the cordon bleu for cannibal cuisine. Hannibal Lecter himself might savor something called “Svend’s Chicky-Wickies” — not poultry at all, of course, but fillet…
Some people think they’re a new art form; others see them as adolescent time-killers. Whatever they are, video games don’t make good models for feature films (mostly because their interactive essence is lost), and their clumsy transfer to the big screen continues to invite all kinds of speculation — not…
Peter Forsberg’s in Sweden. Joe Sakic’s in limbo. The most inept commissioner in professional sports, Gary Bettman, is in dutch — with everyone from the wheat farmers in Bemidji to the guys who sell hot dogs at the Pepsi Center. In other words, the stars have been perfectly aligned this…
When the great French director Jean Renoir immigrated to the United States, he wasted no time making an American masterpiece that is, in the view of many film scholars, the equal of Grand Illusion or The Rules of the Game. The Southerner, released in 1945, chronicles the struggle of a…
Joined at the hip and in the editing room, the peerless co-writer/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have been called “the Lennon and McCartney of British cinema” because they brought artistic striving and a daring spirit of invention to every film they made together — even the most commercial projects…
The grim little green-walled apartment where Walter finds himself after his release has the look of a jail cell — with one apparent easement. What seems to be the only window in the place faces a school playground across the street. When Walter looks outside, he often sees kids running…
Nobody messes with Samuel L. Jackson — at least not at the movies. He’s Shaft reinvented, the coolest cop on the street. He’s Mace Windu, the only swashbuckler in the Star Wars galaxy who gets to swing a purple light-saber. Best of all, he’s Jules Winnfield, the ultra-hip hit man…
Just for grins, John Elway’s handsome new saloon in Cherry Creek offers something called a “Smashburger” — a nice hunk of prime steak that’s run through the grinder, knocked into an edible shape, expertly broiled and served without a roll. Nine bucks. Wonder if Elway was thinking about his old…
lint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artistŠwith a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-Western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself a break…
While Michael Moore and Mel Gibson garnered most of this year’s critical attention, plenty of fine films opened to little or no fanfare. Following are our reviewers’ favorite movies that didn’t draw the adulation they deserved. Consider yourself armed for the next trip to Blockbuster. Control Room. In a year…
The Gospel According to Mel Who needs studio publicists when every fundamentalist pastor in the country is herding his flock to the multiplex? Why waste good money on TV spots when the Vatican is handing out rave reviews? No doubt about it, Thomas, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ…
Our best movies of the year may actually have been anything but the best to a few of our critics: Such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team of Bill Gallo,…
Released in 1960, La Dolce Vita is the film that gave currency to the term “Fellini-esque” — and a name to a lot of lousy Italian restaurants in the rural Midwest. The most famous and most accessible of Federico Fellini’s works, it’s a heady mixture of Catholic iconography and sexual…
By all accounts, the only living creatures who’ve never taken in a stage production of The Phantom of the Opera are Osama bin Laden and Uncle Elmer’s deaf hound dog, Bart — which means that everyone else on the planet has an opinion about how Joel Schumacher’s zillion-dollar movie version…
Wonderful game, baseball. Nothing quite like the sights and sounds of the good old national pastime. The happy crack of hickory on horsehide. The dazzle of white flannel against a freshly mowed acre of emerald-green outfield. The irrepressible excitement of kids high up in the stands, faces aglow beneath their…
Catherine Breillat’s Sex Is Comedy could serve as a companion piece to a pair of earlier French movies about making movies — Franois Truffaut’s enduring valentine Day for Night and the entertaining 2001 farce My Wife Is an Actress. But Breillat, who most recently gave us a scorching glimpse into…
All right, all right. It’s well established that White Christmas (1954) wasn’t nearly as good as its model, Holiday Inn, and never will be. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen were more energetic and appealing in other musicals, where the plots weren’t so thin and the dancing was better. And,…
Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana’s fascinating documentary Overnight is a kind of instructional video about how to fail in showbiz. Actually, that’s putting it too gently. It’s really about willful self-immolation, about letting raw ego and crazy delusion run amok, about driving friends and family into storms of rage…
