There’s a new movie called Hero. Don’t confuse it with that dusty Dustin Hoffman vehicle, nor with the epic Bollywood musical-espionage extravaganza Hero: Love Story of a Spy (though that’s worth a mind-altering look if you can find it). America and India aren’t directly involved here, but huge imperial issues…
This October, Hollywood will once again reveal its gift for scavengery (not a word, but should be) when it releases The Grudge, a Sarah Michelle Geller/Bill Pullman vehicle designed to scare us right out of our underwear. In the meantime, why not catch the incredibly chilling Japanese film that inspired…
Common Ground. The Sandra Phillips Gallery specializes in abstraction, as is shown off in the current show, Common Ground, which combines neo-abstract-expressionist paintings by Jennifer Scott McLaughlin with neo-constructivist sculptures by William Mueller. Gallery owner and director Sandra Phillips discovered both artists at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art’s…
It should go without saying that when one goes to see a movie about giant killer snakes, the main point of the whole endeavor is to watch people get eaten by giant killer snakes. Hardly rocket science, that. But while Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid does feature a…
Some of the people who helped bring you dank, morose amusements such as The Crow, Dark City and The Matrix have a new movie to offer. Like The Matrix, it features a dork who flies through the air. As in Dark City, we witness the protagonist’s world radically changing shape…
The 12th Annual Denver International World Cinema Independent Fall Film Festival — quite a mouthful, no? — will feature three days’ worth of feature films, documentaries and shorts from around the globe at downtown Denver’s Acoma Center. British actor/director Leon Herbert will appear in person with his new feature, Emotional…
Colorado Clay. Colorado has been a regional center for ceramics for just over a century. The reason is obvious, at least to gardeners and structural engineers: It’s all that darned clay. This sets up Colorado Clay, which has been held at Golden’s Foothills Art Center since the ’70s, to be…
Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now thirty years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
Although most people in the moviegoing universe by now know the differences between an “Alien” and a “Predator,” putting the two beasties together in one movie really ought to necessitate more specific species names for each, since both are technically aliens and predators (they’re from outer space and they hunt…
Until now, the landmark creature feature Godzilla (1954) has never been shown on this side of the Pacific in all its high-budget (but still cheesy) glory. The uncut version, in a new 35-millimeter print straight from the lab in Japan, restores forty minutes of previously unseen footage just in time…
Dots, Blobs and Angels. Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an enormous solo that is dedicated to the late David Rigsby, an artist who played a big part in the local art scene in the ’70s and ’80s. The exhibit was organized by director Cydney Payton, who installed it…
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song: the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted — it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that…
The return to the screen of the ravishing Chinese actress Gong Li, who may have the most expressive face in film, should be cause for rejoicing among her millions of admirers around the world. After starring in a series of memorable and politically controversial films directed by her former paramour,…
Say hello to a pop-cinema masterpiece. This new Japanese import opens with a massive thud not unlike Godzilla’s footfall, and its cinematic legacy stretches back almost as far. It’s got crafty Samurai action, hilarious bits of business, insightful observations into the human condition and geysers of kitschy computer-generated blood. Oh,…
The final installment of the gory trilogy that launched, then buoyed up, horrormeister Sam Raimi’s directorial career, 1993’s Army of Darkness, goes for broke in the outrageous plotting department. The innocent hero, played by a wisecracking Bruce Campbell, is transported back to the fourteenth-century stamping grounds of King Arthur –…
Emerson Woelffer, et al. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has a rich assortment of attractions this summer. An Exhibition by Dale Chihuly showcases the artist’s ’70s-era glass work, which was inspired by American Indian art. One of his chandeliers has been installed in the lobby, and the solo also…
In the 1950s, pneumatic Hollywood glamour girls like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell made it their business to ensnare unsuspecting men with a combination of cunning, raw charm and decolletage. So it is in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a splendid 1953 trifle in which the sassy seductresses hunt their prey on…
Sheathed in a custom-tailored gray suit and sporting expensively barbered silver hair, Tom Cruise looks like an older, harder version of the self-absorbed L.A. sharpie he played sixteen years ago in Rain Man. But in Collateral, a frenetic Michael Mann action thriller that runs up a Baghdad-level body count, the…
There is nothing mysterious or subdued about Stacy Peralta’s enthusiasms. A product of Southern California’s vivid beach scene, Peralta’s been a surfer since boyhood and was a professional skateboarder in the Œ70s before he started making documentaries about the defining moments of those sports. The phenomenally successful Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Dots, Blobs and Angels. Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an enormous solo that is dedicated to the late David Rigsby, an artist who played a big part in the local art scene in the ’70s and ’80s. The exhibit was organized by director Cydney Payton, who installed it…
Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush-administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake of…
Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…
