By 1974, the year funnyman Mel Brooks directed Blazing Saddles, the Hollywood Western was all but extinct, a casualty of America’s Vietnam War weariness, and our dawning awareness that maybe the cavalry weren’t such good guys after all and the Indians not quite the vicious savages we’d imagined. It was…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Love him or hate him, filmmaker Michael Moore knows how to get under your skin. As a political muckraker, he favors schoolboy rage over measured argument; as a social satirist, he never fails to slug us with a hammer when a scalpel might serve him better. A self-appointed guardian of…
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know?!, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
A jury award-winner at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold offers a revealing look at contemporary Tehran through the day-to-day life of a suspiciously impassive pizza-delivery man named Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), who rides through the streets of the city on his motor scooter as if…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock back a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…
So let’s get this straight: You’re a much-loved comedian who just did a low-budget, multi-award-winning film with an acclaimed up-and-coming director. In recent years, thanks in part to your work with the younger, edgier filmmaking set, you’re starting to be taken seriously as an actor. You even managed to score…
The notoriously plotless musical comedy Head became an object of cult worship almost from the moment of its release, in 1968; with each passing year, it amuses people even more as a telling artifact of ’60s pop culture. What less could we expect of a movie that stars the made-for-TV…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Devotees of the Boulder Outdoor Cinema all know the drill: You bring your own lawn chair. Or bean bag. Or yoga mat. If you’re strong and ambitious and think you might need a snooze, you bring your own couch. Whatever you choose to sit or lie upon, you get it…
Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl, Lynn Heitler. There are four single-artist shows at the William Havu Gallery: Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl and Lynn Heitler. The first is Aaron Karp, mostly made up of large paintings that illustrate the New Mexico artist’s classic style. Karp’s paintings…
Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen-sexual-awakening movie Y Tu Mam´ También. So it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage wizard-in-training hiding under…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…
Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists. The mood is classic modernist with…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess — playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie — a collection of eleven shorts made over the last two decades — to be a movie at…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
