The King and I. Some of the problems with this production are inherent in the show itself. With its emphasis on strong women and abhorrence of anything resembling slavery, The King and I was progressive for its time, but no artist can entirely escape the myths and preconceptions of his…
Swearing In: Year of the R-Rated Comedy It’s an unavoidable trend — if two movies make a trend, that is — so much so, that if you Google the phrase “the return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the…
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store. Balzac and the…
When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics –…
If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the website that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did it…
Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film starring Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and daughter…
Dennis Gansel’s disturbing feature Before the Fall explores a little-known detail of the Nazi horror: the recruitment of more than 15,000 young men (and some girls) into elite training schools called “Napolas,” where they were groomed as athletes, soldiers and “ideologically correct” scholars. “These youths,” Adolf Hitler proclaimed in 1938,…
Serenity (Universal) Joss Whedon’s film version of his TV series Firefly came and went like a lightning bug in October; the predicted phenom stuck around the multiplex just long enough to lose millions. But like Firefly, which sold enough boxed sets to warrant a movie, Serenity’s bound to do well…
The myth of the Wild West has mutated over the past half-century. Where once we thrilled to the wholesome exploits of the Lone Ranger, now we wallow in the mesmerizing depravity of HBO’s Deadwood. Film geeks can argue about when it started to change, but by 1992’s Unforgiven, pop culture…
The Singer Gallery never ceases to amaze me. Credit for this must be given to Simon Zalkind, the gallery’s able director. Despite a modest budget and even more modest facilities at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, Zalkind invariably comes through with some of the best exhibits in the…
It’s full speed ahead for the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building (see review). With the structure to be completed in less than a year, the DAM recently announced the acquisition of three monumental outdoor sculptures that will adorn the grounds. “Big Sweep” (maquette, right) is a gigantic 35-foot-tall…
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…
There are two things to be said about this production of Aida, a rock-pop version of the Verdi opera with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. The first is that it’s a shlocky, sentimental piece of theater, with sappy music and idiotic book and lyrics. Almost all…
A Christmas Carol. Written by Richard Hellesen with music by David de Berry, this Christmas Carol has its strengths. It’s respectful of the novel, using much of Dickens’s original dialogue and description to tell the tale of the miserly businessman, Scrooge, and his conversion to kindness by the ghosts of…
Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much…
The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don’t feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun With Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey’s tireless antics — slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and…
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yep, and there’s actually a pretty good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer…
For your Heath Ledger holiday-movie options, you have: a) a cowboy in love with another man; and b) history’s most infamous womanizer. Since the name Casanova is synonymous with an unquenchable thirst for straight sex with women (or at least boasting about it), the role might seem to be a…
The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and it has…
Unless your new plasma TV is the size of a conference table, it’s a good idea to skip the DVD option and make straight for a movie theater to take in Lawrence of Arabia. The deepest pleasure of David Lean’s 1962 classic — all 227 minutes of it in the…
