Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989-1997 (Warner Home Video) There’s good reason to be skeptical of an eight-disc Batman set that forces you to buy the campy Joel Schumacher movies (Batman Forever, its title a veiled threat, and Batman & Robin) when all you need are the dark Tim Burton…
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…
When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she’s sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps…
This fall, the roll call of gigantic ghosts inhabiting cinematic biographies continues unabated, with Joaquin Phoenix as a shrunken Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, David Strathairn as an inscrutable Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ambitiously manipulative Truman Capote in…
The protagonist of Lodge Kerrigan’s deeply moving, uncomfortably intimate Keane is the kind of pariah most urban dwellers will do anything to avoid. Rocking foot to foot, the poor man mutters angrily to himself or shouts at the air, a captive of demons that only he can hear. Eyes bloodshot,…
DreamWorks is so anxious to have you believe in its latest family movie that the words “Inspired by a True Story” are actually part of the title. Yep, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story is the proper name, and publicists have been well coached to say and write out the…
When watching Where the Truth Lies, a film noir about a young celebrity journalist’s obsession with a comedy duo from the 1950s, a single question arises again and again: Why? Why have the immense talents of Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, both of whom are excellent in this movie, been…
Elijah Wood is not a believable tough guy. Probably this comes as no great revelation to you. There’s a reason that the Lord of the Rings video games tend to focus on Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf — Wood’s Frodo is a wuss, and everybody knows it. So any movie that’s…
For Western viewers willing to spend 143 minutes inside a cocoon-like Chinese theme park littered with scaled-down reproductions of the Eiffel Tower, the Piazza San Marco and the Taj Mahal, Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) can be a rewarding experience. As with the bogus pyramids and ersatz Empire State Buildings…
Arrested Development: Season Two (Fox Home Entertainment) The best show on TV — which you’d know, if you actually watched the thing — also serves as one of the best reasons for the existence of DVD: No show has ever rewarded multiple viewings the way Arrested Development does. The second…
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…
Good Night, and Good Luck, a riveting movie that’s as entertaining as it is socially and politically important, could not have come at a more propitious time. But more than just the right film at the right moment, George Clooney’s sophomore directorial effort is dynamic filmmaking: brilliantly conceived, visually arresting,…
It happened almost with the first step off the airplane at the Toronto airport last month. Someone, a friend or merely a concerned stranger, would stop to warn you of impending peril. They would plead with you to avoid the danger ahead in Elizabethtown, the Cameron Crowe film that screened…
It’s the cover-up, stupid! It doomed Nixon during Watergate, got Clinton impeached, inspired outrage against the Catholic Church and apparently is part of the day-to-day operations at places such as Enron and Tyco. The initial crime is bad enough, but the conspiracy to hide it always ends up hurting more…
Her name is Domino Harvey, and she is a bounty hunter. If you’ve seen even one TV spot or theatrical trailer for Domino, you’ve heard that message ground into your brain like an annoying jingle. What you might not know is that Domino Harvey was a real person, the daughter…
The anguished paintings of Edvard Munch, who was born in 1863, foreshadowed expressionism and provided uneasy visual correlatives to the horror and loneliness of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t until 1974 — three decades after the Norwegian painter’s death — that a filmmaker captured the spirit of Munch’s work…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection (Universal Studios) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14-film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive’ as the box claims — missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant…
Full and PLANNING.ABSTRACT. Denver painter Bruce Price is clearly Colorado’s preeminent post-minimalist, as proved by the recent batch of fabulous creations in FULL: New Paintings by Bruce Price. These paintings, though clearly a continuation of Price’s past efforts, are also completely new-looking and very different conceptually. A protegé of the…
Ah, Wallace and Gromit. Who doesn’t get a little lift at the sound of those names? Who doesn’t feel the edges of her mouth begin to tickle toward a smile, her heart grow warmer with images of the love between a (plasticine) man and his (plasticine) dog? Perhaps you’re not…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed with the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad…
All the publicity for Waiting… has focused on the scene in which an annoying customer at the fictional chain restaurant ShenaniganZ sends her food back to the kitchen, where it meets with all sorts of nasty modifications, courtesy of some dandruff, pubic hair and mucus. The teaser posters depicted similarly…
