Give Dan Harris, the writer-director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor…
It’s not easy to pull off a good morality tale. Too often, movies with a message, or about a movement, reduce characters and events to type. They pit unqualified good against unqualified evil — a dark-narrative temptation — and, like so much of what issues from Hollywood, do so to…
Thanks to the talky self-absorption of everyone from sleek Julia Roberts to slovenly Michael Moore, the Academy Awards broadcast is always too long by half. For the short of it, why not open the package called Oscar Shorts 2005, on view this week at Starz? The three Oscar-nominated animated films…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
At first (and second and maybe even third) glance, it’s all so familiar: Keanu Reeves shrouded in a black trench coat that flaps behind him like a superhero’s wings, moving between netherworlds and a real world used as a battleground, breeding ground and playground for higher beings amused and appalled…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a twelve-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at because…
A cynic might describe movies as the most depraved and fantastic system of exploitation ever devised. After all, they trade on the greed and hubris of the financiers, the beauty and allure of the stars and the trust (or, if you prefer, gullibility) of the audience. No one involved in…
It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere but Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sob-fest The Joy Luck Club. Then, in…
Movie cultists, rejoice. An eight-week-long Friday-night series called “Reel Late With Keith Garcia” opens Friday, February 18, with Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Chris Columbus’s debut comedy follows a teenage babysitter (Elisabeth Shue) who takes two kids with her to downtown Chicago to help get a friend out of a jam…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
Bride and Prejudice is the third major American film in the past few years to fuse the epic romantic musical stylings of Indian “Bollywood” movies with more Westernized, “Hollywood” elements. It’s also the most successful of them, but when the only significant competition has been The Guru and Bollywood/Hollywood, that…
One should expect little from the man who has directed an Olsen twins movie (It Takes Two, the one with Steve Guttenberg, no less), Matthew Perry’s first Friends-to-film entry (Fools Rush In, its title an apparent nod to audiences who went to see it), and Sweet Home Alabama, one of…
If you want to know what Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is all about, it’s pretty easy to sum up. It starts with a big fight, as a group of local villagers plays capture the flag in the branches of a large tree. Then there’s a brief stretch of plot, as…
The White House and the Pentagon don’t find the French very funny these days, but you might. The Denver Film Society’s five-week Comédies à la Française series begins Wednesday, February 9, with Cedric Klapisch’s rollicking sex farce L’Auberge Espagnole (2003), in which seven coeds living in a Barcelona apartment confound…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
When we first see Tony Fingleton, the plucky Australian hero of Swimming Upstream, he’s a cute little guy getting cuffed around by his vile big brother, Harold Jr. That’s just the beginning of a long ordeal. For the next two hours of screen time, Tony (played as a teenager by…
The Sea Inside, the new right-to-die drama from Spanish director Alejandro Amen´bar (The Others), is a flawed film that’s worth seeing. Based on Letters From Hell, a book by quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro about his thirty-year quest to kill himself, the movie favors the emotional over the legal, centering on Sampedro’s…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare¹s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
If you can make it past the first ten minutes or so of Hide and Seek without busting up laughing, chances are that you’ve never seen a horror movie before in your life. This hack job of a “thriller” may steal from the best, but it does it so badly…
The thirteenth annual Black History Month Film & Video Festival this weekend will feature two films by the renowned Mexican documentarian Rafael R. Corona, as well as a 29-minute look at a late, lamented African-American bookstore here in Denver and a piece on the plight of Haitians as seen by…
Andy Miller. One of the most thoughtful artists around, Andy Miller is the subject of a self-titled solo at Pirate. Miller is known for his postmodern sculptures and installations in which oversized and simplified figures play key dramatic roles. For this installation, Miller has built two monumental figures, one representing…
Some people think they’re a new art form; others see them as adolescent time-killers. Whatever they are, video games don’t make good models for feature films (mostly because their interactive essence is lost), and their clumsy transfer to the big screen continues to invite all kinds of speculation — not…
