No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer/director/star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work: It’s a direct reference…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
Perhaps no filmmaker working today better exemplifies the great humanist tradition of Italian neo-realism than the gifted Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, whose movies — A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq (aka Songs of My Motherland), and now Turtles Can Fly — deal with the plight of the Kurdish…
The Game of Their Lives is the second movie in the past three years with that title, and also the second about a major soccer upset during the World Cup. The first was a documentary about the North Korean team of 1966; while it was fascinating, it has yet to…
Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
Amanda Peet. Ashton Kutcher. Romantic comedy. Who’d have thought it could work? And yet A Lot Like Love is an entertainment success, a triple threat of fresh writing, inspired directing and, yes, good acting. Fortified with a healthy dose of intelligence, it manages to leap clear across an entire field…
The Denver Art Museum’s beautifully chosen series The Art of Silent Film continues this week with a screening of Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), G.W. Pabst’s socially prophetic melodrama about a German pharmacist’s daughter (American Louise Brooks) whose big-city innocence leads her to a reformatory, then a brothel. Strategically…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film-school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year is more likely to find it a pretentious load of crap. Set in contemporary London and…
Lost Embrace, by Argentinean director Daniel Burman, looks more like a handheld video by the purist Dogme school of Denmark. Centered in Buenos Aires, it’s an unevenly amusing comedy of family reconciliation that looks like a thumb in the eye and tastes of Europudding throughout. Ariel is a hangdog thirty-something…
The Woody Allen who wrote and directed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) back in 1972 was not yet the full-bloom, all-promises-delivered Woody who gave us Annie Hall and Manhattan — but at least he wasn’t the inert and seemingly dispirited moviemaker who…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its…
When was the last time you walked out of a theater feeling shell-shocked, saying to anyone who would listen (in language more profane): “Dude, that was some seriously messed-up stuff!” Not your garden-variety messed-up stuff, mind you, like in Saw. Not the messed-up revelations of political docs. We’re talking the…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than twenty years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
Filmmaker Rick Ray spent four months in India, where one-sixth of the earth’s people live, shooting his wide-ranging documentary, The Soul of India. Ray will introduce and discuss the new film in Boulder this week as part of the Macky Travel Film Series at the University of Colorado. Along with…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American Dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most discomfiting…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie,…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…
A spinoff of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days: as tepid sitcom, benign product and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of 2002’s charmingly lightweight hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for teardown. It’s…
In the big box-office months of December and January, Mike Nichols’s Closer was overwhelmed by the likes of The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby. Now comes a second chance to catch this boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing, adapted from a play by talented Brit misanthrope Patrick Marber. It…
