To my ten-year-old daughter, the term “American Girl” means “that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms — won’t let me go near.” While we’re on the defensive, why should I? She hates dolls, and I — creeped out by row upon row of…
A topsy-turvy Escherland exists where Dario Argento’s The Mother of Tears is considered a twisted classic, and it is a magical place. Up is down, sour is sweet, sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie and Hitchcock never made a more ripping yarn than Jamaica Inn. A once-great director’s near-worst work…
I wasn’t prepared to like I’m Through With White Girls (The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks), but I did like it — I liked it a lot. Despite the title, the film isn’t really about race; it’s about finding someone to love and sticking with them, despite their quirks and…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring fhe Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate — and,…
The Edge of Heaven disembarks stateside still flush from an award-reaping Eurasian tour. That the European Film Awards tossed Fatih Akin’s intercontinental, cross-cultural ensemble piece a Best Screenplay statuette makes perfect sense: It’s not brilliant, but it wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships…
The Foot Fist Way has been trying to break into theaters since clawing its way down film-fest row, beginning at Sundance in ’06. It took Will Ferrell and his comedy life partner, Adam McKay, to get distributors interested. Notes the trailer: The men behind Anchorman and Talladega Nights “watched it…
Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide and…
A man in a Michael Jackson outfit — red shirt, black jeans, white face mask — rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a stuffed monkey puppet with angel wings. The background is a nondescript go-kart track…
The idea behind the Gaia Film Festival is that simple choices can inspire us to make a difference, thus changing the world, one choice at a time. That’s why you’ll find films such as the Colorado premiere of Saida Medvedeva’s Water, which examines the secrets of the most common substance…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
The screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything…
Loath though I am to carp about any director who’s devoted chunks of his career to bringing the non-white world’s suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode’s The Children of Huang Shi — a drama based on the life of an Englishman who saved an orphanage full of boys from Japanese…
In recent days, Universal’s been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action-figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one sneak-preview audience,…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
It’s the age-old debate: What’s better, the original, classic story, or a bells-and-whistles remake? Old-school or new-school? The Denver Film Society has joined the debate with its Old School + New School film series, which features two films, separated by decades, screened in a single night and discussed afterward by…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsized codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
Dale Chisman. Since Dale Chisman is among the greatest abstract painters who ever plied their trade in Colorado, this show is unquestionably one of the most significant of the year. Recent Paintings by Dale Chisman is also a rare chance to see his work in depth, as it has been…
Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown winging its way around the web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock is…
Video virtuoso and 2006 MasterMind winner Johnny Morehouse is hip to the fact that these days, people have short attention spans. Really short attention spans. And really short attention spans call for really short films . Five minutes sounds good; five minutes is about the maximum amount of time you…
CANNES, France—Wading through 20-odd movies in half as many languages, each Cannes jury supplies its own dramatic narrative, to be interpreted according to its president’s presumed taste. Days before the 61st Cannes Film Festival ended, rumors were rife that the jury was having difficulties reaching consensus. As the award ceremony…
