I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort. Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly…
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star, a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this…
One of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men will be the centerpiece of four film screenings and a lecture this weekend at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Cary Grant Film Festival begins on Friday evening, April 23, and will be highlighted by the Nancy Nelson Masterpiece Lecture at 6…
Hidden Images. On the mezzanine of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Hidden Images, which is dedicated to recent work by major contemporary Czech artist Adéla Matasová. The show is made up of a handful of things, including a group of conceptual installations that reconcile minimalism to movement. Three of…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior-high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in a…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats, unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers just…
Claude Lanzmann’s agonizing epic Shoah (1985) remains, in critic Roger Ebert’s phrase, “one of the noblest films ever made” and, beyond all doubt, one of the greatest non-fiction works committed to celluloid. It runs almost nine and a half hours but never betrays its great length because (Ebert again) this…
Don Stinson, Chuck Forsman and Eric Paddock/Jim Colbert. The Western landscape’s natural beauty has taken hold of the imagination of generations of artists, but during the last twenty years, some have chosen to examine the stickier topic of civilization’s affect on the scenery. This intellectual approach is the collective theme…
It is, to those of us born and raised in Texas, the Greatest Story Ever Told and Retold; who can forget the Alamo when it’s on every Texas history-class final exam? At 5 a.m. on March 6, 1836, some 189 Texan soldiers and volunteers were slaughtered while trying to protect…
Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings never shows an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than deal with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope with the…
Among the film world’s brilliant jokers and devoted anarchists, Luis Buñuel has no equal — never will. And in the great, daunting body of the Spanish director’s work, which spans five decades, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) must rank somewhere between the sublime and the miraculous. Always at home…
Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Art From the Logan Collection. The normal stock in trade for the Denver Art Museum’s Asian-art curator, Ron Otsuka, is traditional styles, but he’s been drafted into doing contemporary duty by a gift that includes more than a score of pieces by Asian and Asian-American artists…
The Golden Age of the Comic Book Movie has turned the color of tarnished copper. But there’s no going back, not when comic shops have become movie studios’ research-and-development labs. There’s no moving forward, either; the comic-book movie has become a cinematic smudge once more, each blurring into the next…
Okay, say you feel like leaping from a highway overpass onto the roof of a fast-moving truck, then bouncing onto the top of the van that follows and then crashing headfirst onto the pavement. In Hong Kong, there are plenty of movie directors happy to let you try it. Just…
In the ’60s and ’70s, underground cartoonist R. Crumb captured the anxieties and neuroses of an entire time and spawned a major cult with his “Keep on Truckin'” panels, his X-rated scoundrel Fritz the Cat and the unbridled lunacy he brought to Zap Comix. But it took the inspired documentarian…
Don Stinson, Chuck Forsman and Eric Paddock/Jim Colbert. The Western landscape’s natural beauty has taken hold of the imagination of generations of artists, but during the last twenty years, some have chosen to examine the stickier topic of civilization’s affect on the scenery. This intellectual approach is the collective theme…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects that seem to run off the leash; it’s a time-killer, if you will. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources: a series of domestic studies conducted back in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to…
The re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers couldn’t come at a more crucial time. Shot in stark black and white and employing a pseudo-documentary style that was widely imitated, this political classic from 1966 is a startlingly intimate portrait of Algerian nationalists who, from 1954 to 1962, sought…
BECAUSE THE EARTH IS 1/3 DIRT. The CU Art Museum on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus is an unlikely setting for a blockbuster contemporary ceramics exhibit — but here it is, anyway. The show was curated by a committee that included museum director Lisa Tamiris Becker and CU art…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a man has recollections of a soured relationship erased from his brain, may be the most romantic movie in recent memory, if you will pardon the unforgivable pun. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, it’s about many things –…
Oh, dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her? There’s no denying that Angelina’s sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off…totally hot, no question. Given her work with the U.N. and wild-animal…
