What is it with third installments of superhero film franchises? For whatever reason — and, oh, let’s just call it the lack of fresh ideas commingled with the love of money — they always strike out swinging. It happened with Superman, when Richard Pryor became a superfriend hatching the ridiculous…
Anyone who doubts that moviemaking is an essentially masturbatory endeavor would do well to come — preferably alone — to Jean-Claude Brisseau’s The Exterminating Angels. Women may often have the upper hand in this red-hot fantasy of distaff diddling, but the middle-aged French auteur — a former schoolteacher, believe it…
A reformist disciple of dogme, that earth- and camcorder-shaking movement wherein waves are broken and celebration is cause for alarm, Danish director Susanne Bier makes what you’d call emotional disaster movies. Her Open Hearts and Brothers, melodramas at once feverishly pitched and finely tuned, deploy paralysis and war, respectively, to…
In 1978, popular movies such as Star Wars dominated Denver theater marquees for six months at a time. There was no Internet, no downloading, no Netflix. “Blockbuster” was still a term used without irony by studio execs. And art-house cinema was difficult to come by. That same year, the Denver…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Little Children (New Line) In the eyes of Hollywood, our American suburbs are so filled with perversion and treachery that it seems the government ought to crack down on something. Until then, we can count on movies like Little Children to keep us informed. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson are…
The young men move about the muddied hillside engaging in a friendly afternoon game of that national pastime known as hurling. On their way home, they are accosted by a platoon of “Black and Tans,” the occupying soldiers sent from England to stamp out the crackling embers of Irish independence…
Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…
10 People will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch.” So proclaims the poster for The Condemned, a movie executive-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon and starring self- professed “whup-ass machine” Stone Cold Steve Austin and oft-suspended former soccer star Vinnie Jones. So can someone please…
Speaking as the owner of a new puppy, I can say definitively that a dog is both more and less annoying than the average person. Year of the Dog makes much the same point with its pack of uncontrollable pooches, including a cute beagle that rips into the wrong bag…
When director Sam Peckinpah made 1969’s The Wild Bunch — a highlight of the spring film series at the Denver Art Museum — he’d been working in Hollywood for well over a decade and had three previous features under his gun belt. But that didn’t stop him from transforming the…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc collection, finding among such holy-shit discoveries a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites dining…
This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer this time is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of…
There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity, but because they have an innocence that…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, nineteen minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…
To fully appreciate the merits of Vacancy, you need to have the proper technology. Digitally projected lurid images and THX-amplified creaks and moans are all well and good, but what director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller really cries out for are the shabby delights that can only be…
Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who has watched her family massacred…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever — not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film is clearly based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake — the three Stooges inhabiting Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters — will survive should you choose to avoid their movie. Truth be told, you’ve probably never heard of them anyway, unless you’re a regular viewer of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming…
