Barbara Takenaga and Mary Ehrin. These two solos feature contemporary work that’s informed by the influence of nature. Barbara Takenaga: Fade Away & Radiate, comprises a nice selection of abstracts by a New York artist who lived for many years in Colorado. Mary Ehrin: Rockspace is an installation by a…
Like Hancock, the Will Smith flick from last year, 2007’s Big Man Japan tweaks the superhero myth by focusing on a shaggy, thoroughly unconventional guardian of society — one who has more critics than fans. But whereas the former falls to earth thanks to a plot loaded with psychodrama and…
Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’s solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…
The stately Japanese movie Departures comes to theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what Academy voters saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for renewed respect toward…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Standards of Ethical Conduct, premiering on Saturday, June 6, is the sort of local production worth rooting for, despite its many imperfections. Written and directed by Roman Hardgrave, the mid-length flick — at just over forty minutes, it’s too long for a short, too brief for a feature — revolves…
What Fletch was to plaid-clad watercooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, 2003’s Old School was to Gen-X frat rats: a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters trying to capture…
And now for the story of Lips and the dildo. Back in the late ’70s, before Guitar Hero III or Rock of Love 2 or even VH1, a jolly Canadian guitarist named Steve “Lips” Kudlow formed a thrash band with his high-school best friend, drummer Robb Reiner (no relation to…
“The cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that’s true — and who are we to dispute the Master? — then summertime is when we gorge (unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-’em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies). This…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of…
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the auteur behind Three Monkeys, didn’t win the best-director bauble at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his hyperkinetic visuals and mastery of the smash cut. On his latest, he tends to set his camera in place and allow it to stare pitilessly at his subjects for…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
Rumba, which begins its run on Friday, May 22, following a Wednesday-evening preview, is a loopy slab of filmic absurdism that has more in common with the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco than with the movies of Keenan Ivory Wayans and Judd Apatow. Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
Imagine having reached the highest level of skill in your field through hours of grueling work that began when you were four years old. Now imagine knowing that you’ll never get a permanent job, but will, if you’re lucky, be hired periodically — that is, if your potential boss likes…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
The late Pauline Kael named her 1968 collection of film reviews Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in celebration of movies at their most visceral – the ones in which sex and violence and speed combine in ways that produce sheer sensation. Thirty years later, Run Lola Run, screening at midnight on…
At the tail end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around scenic Paris and London for over two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’s Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, sloped off back…
Jim Jarmusch’s anonymous anti-hero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of Control as the Lone Man, exists only in terms of his unspecified mission. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking…
Director Carlos Saura is an elegant stylist with a passion for song and dance that comes through in every frame of Fados, opening Friday, May 8, at Starz FilmCenter. The movie is essentially a series of music videos that are linked sonically — all of the material is derived from…
