Long before he made masterpieces like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers, Sean Aloysius O’Feeney — better known to us as John Ford — directed a silent movie called The Iron Horse (1924). It’s an archetypal early Western, in which a man seeking revenge for his father’s murder…
Dots, Blobs and Angels. Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an enormous solo that is dedicated to the late David Rigsby, an artist who played a big part in the local art scene in the ’70s and ’80s. The exhibit was organized by director Cydney Payton, who installed it…
If you’re wondering how Hollywood could possibly adapt Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of similarly themed short stories bound together by the most slender of common threads, the answer is that it didn’t. The credits for I, Robot read “suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book,” but the canny sci-fi fan…
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
Those in the mood for a bit of authentic swordplay (sans Tom Cruise, that is) would do well to catch Zatoichi #4: The Fugitive this Saturday night. In this 1963 episode of the renowned Japanese film series, the legendary blind samurai Zatoichi arrives in the village of Shimonita (in America,…
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people, dressed way sexily, gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented…
Anchorman, co-written by its star, Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in a random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie…
When Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday back in 1940, he had no idea that his sublime newspaper-world comedy would one day become a treasured relic, lovingly rescued and preserved by the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress. But it has, along with many other great movies from…
cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…
cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in loving, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…
It’s one of the oldest stories in cinema, and possibly in the history of storytelling: A man is kidnapped by a baddie wielding a deadly weapon. His family waits at home to hear word while law-enforcement types try to figure out what’s going on. A plan is developed to deal…
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic than one’s own. I am not by nature romantic, or female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook…
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet life…
Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’s White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order…
It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…
Everyone loves tigers, save perhaps for those actually being mauled to death by them. Men like ’em because they’re wild beasts; women like ’em ’cause they’re big kitty cats. So whatever your point of interest, Two Brothers, starring a pair of tigers named Kumal and Sangha, is the perfect date…
“Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s Porter biopic, De-Lovely. “It’s a musical;…
By 1974, the year funnyman Mel Brooks directed Blazing Saddles, the Hollywood Western was all but extinct, a casualty of America’s Vietnam War weariness, and our dawning awareness that maybe the cavalry weren’t such good guys after all and the Indians not quite the vicious savages we’d imagined. It was…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Love him or hate him, filmmaker Michael Moore knows how to get under your skin. As a political muckraker, he favors schoolboy rage over measured argument; as a social satirist, he never fails to slug us with a hammer when a scalpel might serve him better. A self-appointed guardian of…
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know?!, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
