Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (DreamWorks) Not since Finding Nemo has there been a movie so easy to recommend for all ages and tastes. But despite having crafted a near-perfect film, directors Nick Park and Steve Box second-guess themselves constantly on their audio commentary, as well as…
The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears’s period frolic is this year’s Being Julia, adorned with the…
Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing might be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of…
Tommy Lee Jones’s feature directorial debut is probably much as you’d expect: a blast of nostalgia that nonetheless accepts the realities of modernity, which isn’t surprising coming from an actor who’s getting up there in years but has found more fame as an old man than as a young ‘un…
January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s Black History Month, and Valentine’s Day falls in here, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New…
Here’s the first thing that’s audacious about What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole, the second installment in what has become a franchise of oversimplified science, outlandish speculation and woo-woo spirituality: It’s not a sequel. It’s a revision. Shamelessly, Rabbit Hole uses extensive footage from the first film, including the…
Jessica Sanders’s disturbing documentary After Innocence (Special Jury Prize winner at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival) tackles a hot topic: prison inmates, some of them in jail for more than two decades, who are subsequently found to be wrongly convicted and released back into society with little or no support…
Auditioning Gods, et al. Arvada Center curator Jerry Gilmore has organized a quartet of shows devoted to recent work by Colorado artists. In the lower galleries, Bryan Andrews presents Auditioning Gods, which continues the “fetem” sculpture series he’s been pursuing for years. These hand-carved wooden sculptures are an attempt to…
Written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Marsha Norman, The Holdup is a small, charming piece about the myth of the Old West — or rather, the passing of that myth — that comprises equal parts humor and melancholy. The play is set in 1914, in the high plains of New Mexico. It…
Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits through the years. This disc includes…
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant-Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period…
Here’s a wild theory: Maybe Memoirs of a Geisha didn’t do so well because we’ve been conditioned to think that Asian women painted white, far from being erotic fantasies, are actually the scariest freakin’ evil spirits in the universe. Think about it: Ringu, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters…
There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait till you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…
The big news about Bubble, the new film by director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic), is the way it’s being released. Rather than opening first in theaters, then later on DVD and cable, Soderbergh and his producers have decided to do it all at once. Or so they thought. Turns…
What better time to hear the views of actual American combat soldiers rather than the rhetoric of the politicians who send them to war? In Boulder this week, three eye-opening documentaries — including one that’s rarely been seen since its 1972 release — will give voice to what the Pentagon…
Auditioning Gods, et al. Arvada Center curator Jerry Gilmore has organized a quartet of shows devoted to recent work by Colorado artists. In the lower galleries, Bryan Andrews presents Auditioning Gods, which continues the “fetem” sculpture series he’s been pursuing for years. These hand-carved wooden sculptures are an attempt to…
The Aristocrats(Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians riffing…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since…oh, let’s see…Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand the accolades…
America — and by extension Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again and future generations are similarly traumatized…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real Life, in which he…
