It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’s relaunching of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, he reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, eighteen years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most cliched genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though on paper its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
The sophistication and cynicism of the typical film-goer these days means that cinematic simplicity is damnably hard to pull off — but Iranian director Majid Majidi manages to do so anyhow with The Song of Sparrows, which opens on Friday, April 24. The tale revolves around Karim (Reza Naji), a…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the last four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
Collective Nouns. Metropolitan State College isn’t just one of the city’s major institutions of higher learning; it’s also the state’s largest art school. The most obvious evidence of this is the college’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo, a mini-museum. A more subtle indication of the importance of art at…
The inaugural Scandinavian Film Festival is a modest affair in terms of numbers — just four films, only one of which is feature length. But it makes up in freshness what it lacks in width and breadth. The centerpiece flick, You, the Living (pictured), from director Roy Andersson, was described…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’s sweaty,…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Even the finest documentarians need great material — and filmmaker Kevin Rafferty’s got plenty of it in Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, which begins a week-long run on Friday, April 10, at Starz. Both teams were unbeaten going into this 1968 game, which took place against the backdrop of campus unrest…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…
Emilio Lobato, David Mazza and Dale Chisman. The main attraction at Havu is Emilio Lobato: De Veras, featuring an eye-dazzling display of paintings that rely on the horizontal line for their visual interest. Lobato’s distinguished career dates back several decades; some of the amazing attributes associated with him are his…
Skills Like This, which makes its Boulder debut on Wednesday, April 8, prior to a run at Starz FilmCenter that begins April 17, is a funky, if minor, valentine to the Mile High City. The story, about a talent-free playwright turned one-man crime spree (Spencer Berger, who also wrote the…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for its leg warmers and knee socks than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather to participate in those analog rituals known as Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole. Drawn…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Ballerina, a documentary that premieres at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, March 27, may not be an especially daring piece of work, but its subject matter is so fascinating that the results are regularly compelling anyway. Director Bertrand Normand’s look at Russia’s Kirov Ballet is primarily a celebration, and the five…
