New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wannabe with Sundance credentials, add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop, season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano, serve cool, and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…
Fresh out of the joint with a heroin habit at bay, Sherrybaby’s bottle-blond Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) swoops down on the young daughter she left behind, who’s being cared for by Sherry’s brother and his wife. In her hapless efforts to become a reformed mother, Sherry all but swallows 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…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan¹s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-twentieth-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men — husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats — are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda…
The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s bestseller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private-eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for maximum chiaroscuro…
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…
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…
RADAR. With its outlandish appearance, the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building has overshadowed what’s on display inside. There are a few exceptions, and first among them is RADAR: Selections From the Collection of Vicki & Kent Logan, installed in the Anschutz Gallery. Put together by Dianne Vanderlip, the outgoing curator…
At face value, Alpha Dog — based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending — plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet. In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered fifteen-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of…
What is natural, these days?” a lady dressing for the evening asks her maid, who finds Madame’s violet lipstick a bit too artificial. The year is 1939, the place Paris, after the Munich Conference’s false promises of peace and on the eve of Hitler’s deadly march across Europe. The lady’s…
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…
Bandidas (Fox) This review is not long enough for a suitable treatment of the beauty of Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek. The makers of Bandidas would certainly prefer I tried, though, than to discuss this plodding cliché of a western featuring the two. You could write the script right now…
N on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work — Fatal Attraction for the art-house crowd. Set in a dreary London where a gray funk of fog and cigarette smoke hangs over everyone’s head, Notes fits perfectly…
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…
