Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
It seems just about any movie featuring a positively gay character scares the bejeezus out of religious film critics like Michael Medved and Ted Baehr. So it was merely a matter of time before someone embraced that notion and made an all-out (pun intended) gay film that’s deliberately scary. That’s…
The Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary Edition (Universal Studios Home Video) Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman’s modern-day revival of the Blues Brothers is less a stroke of comedy genius than a dose of karaoke night at Hooters. Fight off those thoughts and pop in this 1980 classic. John Belushi and Aykroyd,…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Fans of the last two Miramax films from Swedish director Lasse Hallstrm — Chocolat and The Shipping News — may be happy to know that he has stuck to the exact same formula for his latest, An Unfinished Life. Like its predecessors, this is the tale of an itinerant single…
The Man isn’t so much a movie as it is a parody of one, the kind of thing people in movies about the movie business pitch as outrageous, inept ideas when a director’s going for the cheap and quick giggle. Only in movies like The Player or Bowfinger or Christopher…
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and the Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It…
Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” is right up there with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” for the sheer number of movies that seem to have been inspired by it. Both are receiving ostensibly faithful adaptations on the big screen this year, but why bother?…
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance hits these shores now in large part due to the recent positive reception for Oldboy. Both films make up two thirds of Korean director Chanwook Park’s “Vengeance” trilogy, with the third, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, due out next year. If you haven’t yet seen Oldboy, which…
Floundering mimics and hopeless imitators come and go behind the camera, but there is only one Alfred Hitchcock. The “master of suspense,” the committed ritualist who combined sadism and satire with the ease of a god, the schemer who created what critic Anthony Lane once called “a whole new etiquette…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
At the opening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s adaptation of the novel by John le Carré, we hear a conversation before we see it. The screen remains black, still running credits, as a man and a woman negotiate a departure. Slowly, the scene dawns, revealing the couple…
Cineastes swooned over Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love, a slow-as-molasses melodrama about two tediously formal people whose spouses are having an affair with one another. Thrown together by circumstances, they find themselves falling in love but, determined not to emulate their cheating…
Remember Nick Cannon? For a while there, he seemed to be the next big young heartthrob, right after starring in the marching-band movie Drumline and the remake of the ’80s comedy Love Don’t Cost a Thing. When Dave Chappelle joked that his son was leaving him for Nick Cannon, people…
Viewers of those VH1 nostalgia countdown shows are familiar with the term “awesomely bad,” denoting a song that one hates to love because it’s unintentionally tacky and awful, yet there’s something about it that won’t let you dismiss it entirely. It’s also a fine way to describe The Cave, but…
Many of those who saw the Disney superhero spoof Sky High were impressed by the debut of Steven Strait. Playing the brooding school bully Warren Peace, who hurls fireballs at our heroes before showing his more sensitive and heroic side, Strait displayed a moody rock-star charisma and an impressive range…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…
The problem with making black-lacquered high school satire is this: Heathers came out in 1989, and it pretty much did the trick. There’s always room for an excellent addition to the genre, and in 1999, it appeared in the form of Alexander Payne’s Election, a film blessed both with a…
The trouble with pornography is that while it sells itself on the authenticity of the sex act, everything else about it is usually artificial, and very blatantly so. The hair color of the leads, most of the female body parts, and especially the situation: When was the last time you…
Wage slaves, unite! Mike Judge’s Office Space, released in 1999, combines the terrors of Franz Kafka with the hopeless workaday fatigue of Dilbert in a pointed satire about cubicle life. The beleaguered hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), is tormented by a parade of identical supervisors; his co-worker Milton (Stephen Root) wards…
