Little Children, a second excursion into middle-class unease by Todd Field after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, opens with a slow pan around a living room whose shelves are crowded with cheap china figurines of… little children. Twisted into insidious grins, their blood-red lips ooze a comic horror…
Movie actors of Nick Noltes clout (and gender) get to decide right down to the last wrinkle and half-ounce of muscle or flab how they want to age on screen. Nolte, weary and grizzled even in his youth, seems to have been prepping for his twilight days since 1976, when…
A multimillion-euro adaptation of a best-selling German novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, relates the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born in eighteenth-century Paris with a uniquely puissant sense of smell. He begins life as an orphan, sold into servitude to a brutal tanner, but in Toucan Sam…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the impressive Breaking…
Robert Wilonsky and Jordan Harper recap their top DVDs of 2006: Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about…
Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in Candy, a don’t-try-this-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author Luke Davies’s aptly billed “novel of love and addiction.” Essentially the film is Requiem for a Dream with a lot less of that overrated indie’s shooting-gallery pizzazz, although director Neil Armfield…
Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back — as in “back from the dead,” referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother…
Given what an awful stiff Somerset Maugham can be, it’s remarkable how many movies have been made of his uptight tales of civil servants sweating it out in British colonies (48 for the big screen alone). John Curran’s fresh take on Maugham’s The Painted Veil, from a crisp script by…
Colorado Classic Architects, et al. Many of the finest buildings in town were done by firms with offices right here in the Mile High City, and they’re the subject of Colorado Classic Architects, a handsome and informative exhibit in the Western Art Gallery on the fifth floor of the Denver…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse, consumed nonetheless), more shit, more piss, more everything till you’d think the Jackasses (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, etc.) would be…
History repeats itself: Eleven Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, they’ve done it again. The 1995 castoff was 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s remake of Chris Marker’s La Jetée; this…
Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade,…
It is said that a great actor or actress can bring down the house, but before I saw (or heard) 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, I cant recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability of a movie theater. When Hudson, who is making…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and if memory serves, it took me twelve years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and forty…
Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodvars Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back as in back from the dead, referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother who…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For a special show inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg selected over 100 works for the impressive Breaking the Mold:…
When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee’s four-part doc, easily the best non-fiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and displeased,…
The actress Viola Davis has carved, handsome features and a tenacious stare that brooks no inattention. Though Davis’s implacable integrity has, for the most part, saved her from the hooker-in-the-hood roles that confine so many black actresses, she has yet to climb out of the prison of dignified maids and…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali…um…the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video: The man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout, is dispiriting. This is an actor coming off a…
Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois’s police procedural owes more to Prime Suspect and Hill Street Blues than it does to any film genre. And Le Petit Lieutenant is all the better for it, if you can withstand the…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Talladega Nights (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements, and gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well…
