A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’s famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal (and frequently raunchy) dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross–whose body of work is…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on its hands and knees to woo Generation Y to…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Among minor works of late-twentieth-century art, something called the CityGrilleburger occupies a special place in our heart–and not just because of its fat count. A luscious beef patty of heroic proportion, it arrives cloaked in melted Swiss cheese, crisp bacon and–the coup de grace–a dollop of garlicky Caesar dressing. It’s…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment powermongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The anti-war and civil-rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance, the…
Just as David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of standup, sketches and TV sitcom. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too-clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he doesn’t…
Next time you’re getting your axles chromed out at A & M Custom Tire and Wheel, don’t miss one of the metro area’s best and most authentic Mexican lunches–right across the street at a plain-faced red-brick hideaway called Christy’s. Never heard of the place? Of course you haven’t. Unless you…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their own Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme…
The love affair at the heart of Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh has to be the longest shot on the board. Pairing a woman of the world with a boy of the streets, it is fueled by sexual obsession and casual cruelty, by the same huge contrasts in temperament…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last thirty years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late-’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After his…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Local admirers of Franco Piavoli’s Blue Planet, a poetic evocation of earthly harmony, will be heartened to learn that the Italian painter/filmmaker’s latest visual ballad, Voices Through Time (Voci Nel Tempo), opens an indefinite run Friday at the UA Flatirons Theater in Boulder. It was previously shown in Colorado at…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is…
There’s an old adage that says by the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it “lived…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema. Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly the qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore: character insight, social analysis and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
