The late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski was an artist of sublime gift and burning conscience. His peerless series of meditations on the Ten Commandments, The Decalogue, will endure for as long as we remember movies; the sum of his work is as compelling as that of any director of the…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and The Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi, but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory, Ghost…
Let’s just get the term out of the way up front: It’s “fag hag” — and a thousand pardons, sensitive readers, but there is no PC equivalent. The new film Stage Beauty is an absolute fag-hag fiesta. Beneath its historical leanings and classic veneer, it’s utterly gaga for girls who…
In the mood for a double dose of low-camp spine-tingle? The Denver Art Museum’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater series will unspool an unashamedly low-budget, high-entertainment-value double feature early next week, just in time for Halloween. British director Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) has a suitably ghoulish title, for…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
Don’t expect Trey Parker and Matt Stone to come at you with little scalpels. Or clever bons mots. The creators of South Park go in for brute, double-barreled-shotgun satire, and anyone who doesn’t feel like being blasted should probably get out of the country — or off the planet. In…
The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s pointed observation, “War is like love; it always finds a way.” In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing Ondrej…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy, in which…
It would be so easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie stars and…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories, released earlier this year and largely ignored on this side of the Atlantic, arises from an unlikely source: a series of domestic studies conducted in the 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. Eighteen observers, perched up in…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we’ve got that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Forget the presidential debates and the carnage in Fallujah. If you want to see real bloodletting, fall by the Esquire Saturday night to catch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is the gruesome cult favorite in which five young innocents who have wandered into the wrong part of rural Texas…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood capitalized on the sympathy and admiration that have enveloped the nation’s firefighters since 9/11, and here we are. Jay Russell’s action-packed, flame-broiled Ladder 49 is an all-out valentine to the firehouse fraternity; it might never have gotten to the screen were…
Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a very sacred image. “Don’t you wish there was, like, another picture of Ché Guevara?” he inquires. “Like,…
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…
It’s the tenth anniversary of John Duigan’s smart, sensual and superb movie Sirens, and I’m reflecting on the comment of a female friend when I asked her how she liked it. At the time, in American pop culture, we were experiencing the last original gasps of the riot-grrrl movement, and…
In case you missed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind earlier this year — or can’t remember if you saw it or not — the University of Colorado International Film Series stands ready to fix you up. One of the quirkiest romantic comedies of recent years, it features rubber-faced Jim…
digital.movement.04. Tracy Weil, owner of the weilworks gallery, has a passion for computer-aided art. That’s why he organized digital.movement.04: Installations in video, sound & digital animation, the first in a planned series of annuals featuring art that employs digital technologies in its creation. Weil put out a call for entries…
