Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in Candy, a don’t-try-this-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author Luke Davies’s aptly billed “novel of love and addiction.” Essentially the film is Requiem for a Dream with a lot less of that overrated indie’s shooting-gallery pizzazz, although director Neil Armfield…

Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodvars Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back as in back from the dead, referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother who…

Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade,…

Sorry to harsh your buzz, but that four-dollar latte purchase of yours often yields little or almost nothing for the African bean harvesters who made it possible. No mere Western guilt-inducing harangue, Black Gold is a highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis. Its calmly accumulated details…

The Denver International Film Festival continues through this weekend with the much-anticipated screening of Heath Ledger’s new flick, Candy, on Friday, November 17, at 9:30 p.m., and Saturday, November 18, at 9:45 p.m. Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in this don’t-try-it-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author…

Among documentary muckrakers, Kirby Dick may not be as righteously indignant as Michael Moore or as brilliantly droll as Nick Broomfield, but say this for the maker and star of This Film Is Not Yet Rated: He’s not afraid to soil his hands to get the story. Rummaging through the…

Milestone in Motion Picture History: On Halloween weekend 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq War era’s bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don’t include Jesus of Nazareth. God or Jack Valenti only knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating “for…

They say youse can never go home again. Nevertheless, Queens-bred big-timer Dito Montiel revisits his old Astoria stamping grounds in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a Sundance-sanctioned testosterone indie loosely based on the thirty-something writer-director and occasional fashion model’s neo-Beat semi-autobiography of the same name. Montiel may be a…

“I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin,” reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs’s wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru’s carnivalesque commune. “No one is gonna believe me anyway.” No one? In fact,…

God is in the details no matter what you believe, but Jesus Camp is content to introduce its exposé of Christian youth indoctrination with shots of a fast-food- and flag-lined highway and the words “Missouri, USA.” Welcome to hell, kids. Missouri — yikes! — is among the holy lands of…

Among documentary muckrakers, Kirby Dick may not be as righteously indignant as Michael Moore or as brilliantly droll as Nick Broomfield, but say this for the maker and star of This Film Is Not Yet Rated: He’s not afraid to soil his hands to get the story. Rummaging through the…

Set in 1942 and ’43 and shot in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows follows a small group of French Resistance fighters in their desperate struggle to survive the Nazis. The movie, too, has been in hiding, at least in the United States, where, amazingly, it went unreleased for 37…

Even curriculum-clutchers might rather leave a child behind than let her learn from Half Nelson’s Mr. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), a Brooklyn junior-high teacher whose off-the-cuff history lessons are based — brace yourself, Bushies — on dialectical theory. History is change, and change, the white teacher tells the kids, most…

The old Lucas/Spielberg stunt of turning B-movie peekaboos into E-ticket thrill rides remains the industry standard — to the virtual exclusion of other multiplex fare, particularly when school’s out. But as not every kid who remade Raiders in Super 8 either gave up the dream or morphed into Michael Bay,…

Slipped into the summer movie season like acid into your happy meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counter-programming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star — or would be, if he weren’t half hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s…

For an industry in decline, print journalism has done a fashion publicist’s job of staying in vogue, particularly among the more stylish of career-seeking college grads. Never mind telling these BlackBerry-toting eager beavers that even an unpaid gig in the field is as rare as a winning lottery ticket: The…

With ice caps melting, sea levels rising and Poseidon sinking fast, this is no environment for any disaster movie — particularly a real one — to take our interest for granted. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, named for the super-bad news of global climate change, isn’t just another lefty doc for…

Like the Grand Ole Opry plopped into a fragrant barn at the county fair, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion befits its roots in frosty Minnesota soil through its worldview, Buddhist by way of Scandinavia: Life is about suffering. The wind chill is below zero, and so is your spouse;…

Such is the currency of lies these days that “Based on an Untrue Story” might well be a shrewd tagline, if an unusually honest one. Still, the recent discovery that teen-prostitute-turned-hardcore-memoirist J.T. LeRoy is merely the fanciful invention of failed-musician-turned-moneymaking-writer Laura Albert won’t necessarily boost the box office of The…

Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist Western” would surely be a cliche if there were enough Westerns to warrant its use more than once every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out-to-pasture as the Western…

Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world’s single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that’s a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping “dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum” is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer…

The Darwinian theory that shlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…