Before there was School of Rock, the 2003 movie in which Jack Black awakened a class of subdued elementary-school kids with lessons in America’s loudest subject, there was rock school. Students of the Paul Green School of Rock Music in Philadelphia have been worshiping at rock’s altar — and learning…
Although they’re exceptional, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late 1970s and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant Stateside release. There is…
About a year ago, buzz started building among horror fans about a French slasher movie titled Haute Tension, about two girls who go to a country house and get terrorized by a maniac in workman’s coveralls. It had been well received in Europe, and horror geeks with websites here occasionally…
Jonathan Swift’s observation that satire is “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” almost certainly applies to moviemakers who ape the work of their peers with comic intent, as evidenced by a well-chosen selection of films on view in Boulder this week. Under…
Alden Mason, Kimberlee Sullivan, and Lorey Hobbs. The changing of the seasons from spring to summer is what inspired William Biety, director of the Sandy Carson Gallery, to put together three solos, each comprising nature-based abstractions. Alden Mason marks the debut of the Washington artist, who is represented in this…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been pre-determined; surely there could be no…
Ten is a magical age, when kids are old enough to make articulate statements about their experience and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the sack lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will shrink to a…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a flawed movie born of a flawed novel, but let this be clear: Girls will eat it up with a spoon. It features three young stars, indulges in rampant romantic fantasy, drips with teary-eyed sentimentality, and pays a heap-load of lip service to…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Ten new films from the Pacific Rim will be on view this week in the eighth edition of the Aurora Asian Film Festival. The four-day event is sponsored by the Denver Film Society, the Aurora Asian/Pacific Community Partnership and the City of Aurora. Festival highlights: Electric Shadows (China), director Xiao…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
If you’re trying to navigate the gulf between the absolutist view inside Fortress Bush and the relativist politics of Western Europe, you need go no further than Brothers, a provocative new drama from Denmark. Superficially, it’s an intimate and rather self-contained film, but director Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, The One…
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) includes plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…
It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on The Ren & Stimpy Show, is virtually plot-free — nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its…
Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback — that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless, witless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t intended to be taken as a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation. (It was…
The mockumentary is a tricky thing, and one not to be attempted by amateurs, many of whom treat the form like a joke without need of a punchline. Damn the filmmaker who thinks it clever and ironic enough to “interview” “real people” “talking” about other “real people” who, of course,…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never comprise…
Here’s the scenario: You’re Jet Li, the international action star who has finally become a semi-household name in America, thanks to imported DVDs and various cinematic team-ups with rappers and singers. But in Hong Kong, where you’ve done several movies that don’t depend solely on ass-kicking, you are revered as…
Tod Browning’s Freaks, a bizarre glimpse into the world of the sideshow, has been the ultimate cult movie for more than seventy years. Talk about impeccable outlaw credentials: At a San Diego preview, a woman ran screaming from the theater; upon the film’s release, in 1932, many American exhibitors refused…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So after getting a look at herself in her first movie in fifteen years, La…
