Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: Last year brought us The Last Samurai,…
In 2004 A.D., as the five remaining members of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe lie in coffins in a Vanity Fair spread to jeer at their own deaths, it’s really nice to have them back together commanding the big screen. Behold anew their wonderfully wiggy Monty Python’s Life of…
Aspiring filmmakers everywhere — many of them with better access to cameras and computers than to, say, actual talent — still daydream about being Kevin Smith. That’s because Smith’s tale is the ultimate indie success story of the 1990s, a fantasy come true starring a young striver who created a…
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 form of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, the Warner Bros. pre-summer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly thirty pounds in thirty days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan/chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to…
If even one of the major networks had a successful sitcom in the vein of Friends but with an all-black cast, movies like Breakin’ All the Rules would have no reason to exist. Part of an ever-expanding subgenre that includes The Brothers, Two Can Play That Game and Deliver Us…
Tim Burton’s fantasy of alienation and acceptance, Edward Scissorhands (1990), is almost as haunting as it is romantic — a cunning mixture of charm and fright that shows us a soul in torment. The gentle title character, played by a young Johnny Depp, is the creation of a Frankenstein-like inventor…
Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Art From the Logan Collection. The normal stock in trade for the Denver Art Museum’s Asian-art curator, Ron Otsuka, is traditional styles, but he’s been drafted into doing contemporary duty by a gift that includes more than a score of pieces by Asian and Asian-American artists…
We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could just as well be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, non-stop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue –…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, a lot of observant American movie-goers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it certainly…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and pre-pubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) puts a hip ’90s spin on the lovers-on-the-run formula perfected early on by Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and, three decades later, by Bonnie and Clyde. Written by ace smart-aleck Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), it stars Christian Slater as a movie-crazed geek named Clarence,…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself), a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the…
Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants. Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Pour a couple of Old-Fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
The strangest and most obsessive of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Vertigo has fascinated assorted movie buffs, philosophers and psychiatric professionals since its release in 1958 — not least because this tangled tale about an acrophobic ex-detective on the trail of an old friend’s beautiful wife suggests that reinventing a living woman…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
