Anthony Minghella’s magnificent film version of the Civil War epic Cold Mountain has much more going for it than Hollywood grandeur. Beyond its striking sets and gruesome battle scenes populated with thousands of extras, in addition to its movie-star glamour — Jude Law and Nicole Kidman are like lovely pieces…
For those who pay no mind to Oprah, the dispute at the heart of House of Sand and Fog concerns the occupancy of a run-down little bungalow just inland from the Northern California coast. It’s not much of a place, really. And to get a glimpse of the Pacific, you’d…
At first glance, it seems odd that French surrealist filmmaker Georges Franju began as a documentarian. But his non-fiction visit to a slaughterhouse (Le Sang des Betes, 1949) and his grim look at World War I relics (Hotel des Invalides, 1951) set the stage, in their way, for his later…
William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…
Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie/film-fest crowd into enemy camps. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and dead-eye…
You know how it’s often the ones we love whose flaws are most apparent? Well, when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I am smitten. This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It…
The third Longmont Film Festival gets under way Thursday, December 18, with Ernst Lubitsch’s heartwarming 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner and continues through Saturday, December 20, with Billy Wilder’s favorite Some Like It Hot (recently acclaimed by the American Film Institute as the best Hollywood comedy ever made),…
On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took eleven passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…
Sorrow sprouts wings and flies in Jim Sheridan’s radiant new film In America, which pits the pain and grief of unimaginable loss against the resilience of the human heart. In this semi-autobiographical tale from the writer-director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, a working-class Irish…
As an alternative to the conventional wisdom emanating from the Pentagon and the White House, Robert Greenwald’s scalding documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War makes for powerful and provocative viewing. As an antidote to the notion that American patriotism consists, in toto, of endorsing any preemptive foreign…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even a black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see…
Honey is one of those movies you will see, swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and back lots), has…
Every year, Santa eats the cookies. Every year, Uncle Elmer overdoes it on the eggnog and lurches into the Christmas tree. And every year, good guy Everyman George Bailey painfully rediscovers the true value of his small-town life and then gathers family ’round the hearth and takes joy in his…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed; no one comes to believe in the…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians so long he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre, Nevada Smith and myriad…
It was wise to wait two years to release September 11, a collection of eleven shorts, each eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame in length. Even now, it’s hard to imagine the viewer whose gut will remain unwrenched. Emphasizing the global impact of the event before the retaliatory bombs…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
It took them four years, but Dark Castle — Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division which puts out a movie every year around Halloween — have finally made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that, this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual,…
Director Jean-Luc Godard, once the enfant terrible of France’s New Wave, was never much known for his charm. The groundbreaking Breathless, made in 1959, was full of enchantments and innovations, but the later films of Godard’s most productive period, such as 1967’s La Chinoise and 1968’s Weekend, were seen by…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will probably end up as a mere footnote. The people who forge van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) more richly…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus, Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom…
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, a collection of ten new films that address social and political unrest in Rwanda, the Middle East, Chile and Bosnia, among other places, will screen November 13-16 at the Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli Building on the Auraria campus. Co-presented by Human Rights…
