Dan in Real Life

Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…

Lake of Fire

Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…

Control

Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which dynamically pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then…

Reservation Road

I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…

Gruesome Twosome

It’s Halloween, and you want to go see a scary movie, but you’re less than thrilled with your available choices. The Denver Film Society feels your pain, which is why, on October 30 and 31, Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli is screening a Gruesome Twosome, featuring the flicks Murder Party…

The Boys Are Back

Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick(Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great and…

Now showing

American Dreams. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were among the first artists to embrace conceptual realism in the 1960s. Although the two no longer collaborate, American Dreams, at the Singer Gallery, focuses on a body of work they did in the 1990s. The paintings and collages combine images of George…

Gone Baby Gone

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950’s “The Simple Art of Murder,” smacking the ascot off the drawing-room mystery and all its crime-solving dilettante dandies. “He must be…a man of honor, by instinct,…

Rendition

Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…

Lust, Caution

“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…

Genuine Fake Robots

Transformers(DreamWorks)No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, no matter how high or high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. So the first half-hour plays flat,…

On Display

Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…

The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D

When Pumpkin King Jack Skellington stumbles from Halloween Town to Christmas Land, no one — except, perhaps, his perceptive little friend Sally — can foresee the impending disaster that will arrive when Jack attempts to take over Christmas for a year. He gets the Halloween Townspeople to help create toys…

The Darjeeling Limited

The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey on board The Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old locomotive traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples (“Probably one of the most spiritual places on earth!”) and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray),…

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: the Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…

Michael Clayton

It will no doubt be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Only, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney-turned-franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow fifteen years ago as the screenwriter of the ice-skating melodrama…

You’ll Laugh Dying

You Kill Me(Genius) Funny thing seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me, as he’s already played the role of a drunken hit man’s boss in The Matador, to which this feels like a slapshtick-noir sequel. It’s also the photo-negative of Sexy Beast: Once more Ben Kingsley plays a killer…

On Display

Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…

The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story

During the early portion of his career, the late Syd Barrett, who named and led Pink Floyd, generally maintained his equilibrium while treading the fine line between genius and madness — but he couldn’t keep up this balancing act indefinitely. His slow-motion tumble into mental illness, and the strange, beautiful…

Into the Wild

To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…

Across the Universe

After Hair, Hairspray, and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the ’60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at…

The Bubble

Had Israeli director Eytan Fox’s new film, about a passionate affair between two men on opposite sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict, been released in the early 1970s (when I was the same age as its twenty-something hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of…