Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with the normally vilified Sheriff of Nottingham…
Another movie, not as awful or deluded as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright, a romantic comedy (for the ladies) with basketball and cameo-ing NBA players in it (for the fellas). That absolutely no…
Charlene Harlow and Linda Campbell. In the west gallery at Edge, co-op member Charlene Harlow has unveiled a suite of unusual abstract paintings in the exhibit New Work by Charlene Harlow. These paintings are bold in several ways: The colors are loud, and she’s used some difficult juxtapositions of tones…
Watching the lauded but fatally slight Mid-August Lunch, a comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it’s hard to believe that writer, director and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit Gomorrah. Amiably self-deprecating to a fault, the…
As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms the…
Colorado Clay. This exhibition began in the ’70s as an annual reflection of the big uptick in interest in ceramics at that time. It is now a biennial event, and although it’s one of the most important ceramics shows on the calendar, it’s not an invitational, as it should be,…
A union-busting doc with an adamant — if not quite apolitical — focus on the children slipping through the cracks, The Cartel uses New Jersey as Exhibit A in its case against this country’s crooked education system. Though it is first in education spending, New Jersey has an abysmal dropout rate…
A genuinely hip, thought-provoking work of art disguised as a doomed documentary resurrected, Exit Through the Gift Shop is not just the definitive portrait of street-art counterculture, but also a hilarious exposé on the gullibility of the masses who embrace manufactured creative personas. Though it’s credited as a Banksy picture…
I took the six-year-old who lives in my house to a sneak preview of Furry Vengeance. The boy’s a savvy consumer of kids’ popular culture — my greatest parenting triumph thus far. He knew from the myriad Disney Channel commercials (the movie stars Matt Prokop of High School Musical 3)…
Looking for the Face…. The half-dozen shows at MCA Denver are collectively titled Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made. Adam Lerner, the museum’s director, acted as lead curator for the exhibits with new hire Nora Burnett Abrams acting as his assistant. Michaël Borremans is a…
Last fall saw the release of the documentary Walt & El Grupo, about Walt Disney and a team of his most talented animators trekking to Latin America in 1941 for both artistic inspiration and to act as cultural ambassadors for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was enjoyable hagiography most likely…
Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books The Losers to ’80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting The Losers for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and…
Looking for the Face…. The half-dozen shows at MCA Denver are collectively titled Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made. Adam Lerner, the museum’s director, acted as lead curator for the exhibits with new hire Nora Burnett Abrams acting as his assistant. Michaël Borremans is a…
Mother, Bong Joon-ho’s followup to his killer killer-tadpole allegory The Host, is a more subtle yet no less visceral horror-comedy. Opening as tumultuous slapstick, this tale of a 27-year-old village idiot, Do-joon (Won Bin), and the local madwoman who is his single parent, Hye-Ja (Kim Hye-ja), quickly darkens once someone…
Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high-school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot…
Looking for the Face…. The half-dozen shows at MCA Denver are collectively titled Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made. Adam Lerner, the museum’s director, acted as lead curator for the exhibits with new hire Nora Burnett Abrams acting as his assistant. Michaël Borremans is a…
Everyone in City Island’s Rizzo family has something to hide: Paterfamilias Vince (Andy Garcia) works as a corrections officer but sneaks off for acting lessons; legal-secretary matriarch Joyce (Julianna Margulies) makes out with Tony (Steven Strait), the ex-con Vince has invited to live with them in the Bronx fishing village…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely-dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation the Runaways. Watch…
We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), about halfway through Date Night, the latest high-gloss, middle-to-low-brow would-be blockbuster from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Just Married). Phil and Claire are middle-class,…
A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Set on the tinderbox margins of a rundown quarter of the Tel Aviv-adjacent city of Jaffa, the movie’s multiple plots…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation relies more on…
