Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Colorado: Then & Now II. In the late 1990s, internationally known photographer John Fielder came up with the idea of re-photographing old shots done by William Henry Jackson. This idea led to an exhibit at the Colorado History Museum in 1999, with this current show being the long-anticipated sequel. The…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this likely won’t be the one…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely co-writer and director James Mangold would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…
A common criticism of Hollywood from the right side of the political spectrum is that it hasn’t made any movies that deal with the War on Terror, the way it did with World War II, for example. The truth is that it’s probably less an example of political bias than…
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…
Years before those airplanes attacked a big monkey as he clung to the Empire State Building, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to exotic climes in their roles as documentarians. This week, Milestone Film & Video released new DVDs of two of their silent masterpieces, and anyone…
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Movie-goers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Hfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro…
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners: Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…
Keira Knightley, who is all of twenty but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin¹, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (a.k.a. Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character Marcus is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta…
German director Wolfgang Petersen’s relentlessly strange fairy tale The NeverEnding Story (1984) has gained well-deserved cult status over the years, not least because it’s one of the only children’s movies ever made whose villain is not some evil wizard or hulking monster, but the existential void. The first English-language film…
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar — like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings — there’s good reason for it. Swofford, twenty years old during Operation Desert Storm in…
Chicken Little is a groundbreaking movie in more ways than one: Not only is it Disney’s first in-house all-computer-generated feature, but on select screens, it will be presented in “Disney Digital 3-D,” a brand-new system created with the help of George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. It’s revolutionary!…
With a name like Prime, a movie had better be about something more than an older woman digging on a younger man, much to the disapproval of the younger man’s mom. It ought to be about, oh, I dunno, math or something — like Pi or Proof or even Primer,…
Tragically, the 1994 genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda didn’t stir the world’s conscience as it should have. A decade later, though, it sent moviemakers scurrying for the their cameras and microphones. The best-known of the films was, of course, Terry George’s fictionalized Oscar nominee Hotel Rwanda, starring Denver native…
Titanic: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount Home Video) Loved and loathed in equal measure, Titanic nonetheless is among the few modern-day movies deserving of lavish treatment; this boxed set, three discs with three hours of new stuff, feels almost as big a production as the feature itself. Writer-director James Cameron, never…
