My favorite news item of recent weeks is the one about the family in New York that’s suing a restaurant chain for $10 million because one of those showy Japanese hibachi chefs flipped a grilled shrimp at a customer. Whether the guy was trying to catch the hot morsel in…
One of the most compelling films of 2004, first-time indie director Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace is a drug movie that has no machine guns and no car chases, just an unforgettable portrait of a sixteen-year-old Colombian girl (played by the extraordinary Catalina Sandino Moreno) forced by circumstance to…
The new Mike Nichols film, Closer, is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing that we might take for outright soap opera or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn, were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of its dialogue…
Patrice Leconte’s Intimate Strangers develops from an intriguing premise: A troubled woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) making her first visit to a psychiatrist walks into the wrong office and starts pouring out her troubles to a baffled (but captivated) tax lawyer (Fabrice Luchini). Too beguiled to set things straight, the lonely lawyer…
Most Nuggets fans can’t read tea leaves, but they’re pretty good with injury reports. Either way, universal health care will be critical to the immediate fortunes of a team that leaped into the season full of newfound hopes and dreams but quickly found its baby-blue ass in a 2-5 sling…
Penek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, released last summer, takes the notion of the Odd Couple to dizzyingly philosophical heights, while the director, who earlier gave us the ingenious musical Mon-Rak Transistor (2001), speculates on time, space and narrative itself. The seemingly mismatched pair here are a meek Japanese…
U.S. Postal Service workers who think they have it tough should probably get a look at Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains. In this deceptively simple and surprisingly moving film set in the early 1980s, a weary Chinese mailman, his wide-eyed, 24-year-old son and their faithful, knowing dog take three…
The punk-hipster appeal of filmmaker Jim Van Bebber is based on half a dozen lurid, no-budget gorefests like My Sweet Satan, in which a suicidal teenager gets strung out on dope and starts worshipping the devil, and Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin, whose maniacal protagonist insists on scraping…
The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it — man, woman or household pet — is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek’s costume changes. After an opening sequence in Los Angeles,…
That pointy brown thing that turns up in the U.S. of A. every autumn is a football — a fact that has escaped most of Colorado’s major colleges and universities this year and has dawned only occasionally on the Emperor of Invesco, Mike Shanahan. Herewith five ways of looking at…
The talented documentarians Albert and David Maysles, both of whom studied psychology at college, were always at their best when addressing offbeat subjects: door-to-door Bible salesmen; a pair of eccentric Jackie Kennedy relatives living in a decrepit mansion on Long Island; the self-absorbed writer Truman Capote; the climate of violence…
When shot with verve and skill, so that you can feel the heat and passion of the moment, a concert film is the next best thing to being there. That’s the way it is with Lightning in a Bottle, a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that captures an extraordinary evening in February…
The late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was an artist of sublime gift and burning conscience. His peerless series of meditations on the Ten Commandments, The Decalogue, will endure for as long as we remember movies; the sum of his work is as compelling as that of any director of the…
Margo Channing cracked wiser. And her devious protegé cooked up better schemes to steal the limelight. Still, half a century after they lit up the screen, the principals in All About Eve would probably get a charge out of Being Julia. This bittersweet backstage drama skillfully combines — as all…
The agony and the ecstasy of Ray Charles’s long journey cry out for a grittier, more direct movie than Taylor Hackford’s Ray — a movie that’s less processed and less outwardly opulent than this one. For much of these two hours and forty minutes, there’s almost no stylistic syncopation, aural…
The good thing about the hockey lockout? Todd Bertuzzi is looking for work. The bad thing? Nobody gets to drive the Zamboni, big lovable galoot of a vehicle that it is. Otherwise, who the hell cares? Not many. Except for the good citizens of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, the people who…
In the mood for a double dose of low-camp spine-tingle? The Denver Art Museum’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater series will unspool an unashamedly low-budget, high-entertainment-value double feature early next week, just in time for Halloween. British director Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) has a suitably ghoulish title, for…
The 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival will get a soulful kickoff at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 14, with an opening-night showing of Ray, Taylor Hackford’s startlingly candid biopic about music legend Ray Charles. Starring a perfectly cast Jamie Foxx as the blind, Georgia-born singer who became a star worldwide,…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories, released earlier this year and largely ignored on this side of the Atlantic, arises from an unlikely source: a series of domestic studies conducted in the 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. Eighteen observers, perched up in…
The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s pointed observation, “War is like love; it always finds a way.” In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing Ondrej…
Don’t expect Trey Parker and Matt Stone to come at you with little scalpels. Or clever bons mots. The creators of South Park go in for brute, double-barreled-shotgun satire, and anyone who doesn’t feel like being blasted should probably get out of the country — or off the planet. In…
Where is everybody, baseball fans? Well, let’s have a look: Larry Walker is in St. Louis, suddenly in the pink and belting playoff home runs. The Montreal Expos are in oblivion, waiting to be revived next spring as — what? Let’s say, the Washington Lobbyists. Most of the Cubs faithful…
