If you’re expecting Mindhunters to be a psychological thriller and you buy a ticket for the movie, you will almost indubitably feel cheated. But break down the film’s title to its most literal sense — hunting for a mind, presumably because those involved were out of theirs — and you’ll…
Kicking & Screaming might be the most predictable movie of the year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: How many times have you gone to a movie and gotten far less than you were expecting? Here that’s not a concern: You may not get more than…
It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer/director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace “that” with “whether”; even…
The Starz FilmCenter’s wide-ranging Global Lens 2005 series, which continues through May, features new films from such exotic climes as Uruguay, China, Turkey, Algeria, Bosnia, Mali and, if the rumors are true, North Dakota and Nebraska. This week, the two features on view will be Lili’s Apron, a comic parable…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Colosseum, or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…
Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters — creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis who could also live next door to and perhaps even inside of you — say and do things they…
It is no great joy to review Palindromes, the latest film from writer-director Todd Solondz, who is loved by those who do not loathe him for such movies as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness and Storytelling. Advance word deemed Palindromes Solondz’s most shocking film, which seemed impossible given its predecessors…
The new House of Wax — a remake, pretty much in name only, of the 1953 Vincent Price movie (itself a remake of a 1933 film) — manages to be gruesome and grisly, but it falls well short of being truly creepy, much less terrifying. Horror aficionados expecting the chills…
Almost no one save Vladimir Putin and a few stubborn ex-Red Army generals laments the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the remnants of that vast failed experiment look more and more these days like items from Ripley’s Believe It or Not. That may be the spirit in which to…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
Agent Fox Mulder, the coolly instinctual sleuth of The X-Files, got pretty good at unraveling paranormal mysteries. If only the actor who played him were as adept at solving the riddle of his movie career. David Duchovny’s new vanity project, House of D, is the tortured tale of a thirteen-year-old…
It seems unlikely that any American outside of a cloistered, sports-averse, PBS-watching film reviewer would have failed to notice the 2002 arrival of Yao Ming, the 7’6″ gentle giant also known as China’s national basketball hero and, in the U.S., the number-one pick in the NBA draft — especially since,…
One attraction of foreign films is the glimpse they provide of exotic lands. But after viewing a startling coming-of-age drama called Schizo, you probably won’t call the travel agent to book ten days in Kazakhstan. Or ten minutes. As revealed by first-time director Guka Omarova and cinematographer Khasanbek Kydyraliyev, this…
Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’s demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…
Can eleven years really have passed? Quentin Tarantino cultists own it on DVD (or at least VHS), and they’ve all watched it nineteen times. But there’s something special about seeing Pulp Fiction again on the big screen, in the company of your yawping, warped, movie-crazed fellow enthusiasts. Where do you…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer/director/star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work: It’s a direct reference…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
Perhaps no filmmaker working today better exemplifies the great humanist tradition of Italian neo-realism than the gifted Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, whose movies — A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq (aka Songs of My Motherland), and now Turtles Can Fly — deal with the plight of the Kurdish…
The Game of Their Lives is the second movie in the past three years with that title, and also the second about a major soccer upset during the World Cup. The first was a documentary about the North Korean team of 1966; while it was fascinating, it has yet to…
