Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November, you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugarplums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls’ and boys’ parents to buy…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence, but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hatred remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
Remember that silly little-girl version of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally… snuffling “I’m difficult!” through a charming tantrum? Well, make it a point to enthusiastically greet Ryan’s new incarnation in the psychosexual thriller In the Cut. Post-Crystal, post-Hanks and even post-husband Dennis Quaid (toward whom this performance almost…
That crazy little girl hidden away behind a cold, white bedroom door in Georgetown, with her mouthful of pea soup and her patented 360-degree head-swivel trick, still has the power to scare the hell out of us, and she will do it again Friday, October 31, in Boulder. The Exorcist,…
That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine; that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers chose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz,…
Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless non-professional and hug it. Such is the case early on in the film Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England, with…
Richard Brooks’s brilliant adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967) remains one of the most chilling true-crime films ever made. The tale of two drifters whose disturbed personalities collide to produce their brutal mass murder of an ordinary farming family in Kansas and, in time, their double execution by…
The six vivid women thrown together by fate in John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys are frequently divided by their bickering, but they are united in a deep common yearning — and of that Sayles has made an observant and provocative drama about the ambiguities of adult life and the…
Before you crack your wallet for Veronica Guerin, you’d be well off to rent a video of the 2000 release When the Sky Falls (working titles: When Heaven Falls and, natch, Veronica Guerin), of which this new Veronica Guerin is basically a tarted-up remake. Same story, same scenarios, same basic…
This year’s North American tour of The Animation Show, opening Wednesday, October 22, and running through Friday, October 24, as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, features a collection of award-winning animated shorts from eight countries. They were chosen by the co-producers, Academy Award nominee Don Hertzfeldt…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenerian hero of the sublime Czech tragicomedy Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he sniffs to the obsequious sales agent at…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole; it’s really half a movie waiting for a proper ending, which is due to arrive in the next volume in February 2004. Until…
In case the stunning French documentary Winged Migration somehow flew right by you during its long and fruitful run at the Mayan, you can still catch it on the giant IMAX screen at United Artists’ Colorado Center, I-25 and Colorado Boulevard. Shooting over three years on all seven continents, director…
The blood-spattered French thriller Demonlover offers about as blunt an indictment of international business culture as you’ll see in any movie. With a dedication that borders on mania, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Les Destinees) attacks what he sees as the greed, ruthless ambition and Byzantine chicanery lurking behind high-powered…
It seems like everybody’s raving up Mexican cinema these days — either as a merit badge of self-conscious hipness or because the stuff is impressive, and sometimes both — but the excitement is definitely merited with Herod’s Law (La Ley de Herodes). This movie kicks the feisty Y Tu Mam´…
In the Starz FilmCenter’s “Language of Film” series, which starts on Tuesday, October 7, Denver filmmaker Alexandre Philippe will examine three great films from a storyteller’s point of view, deconstructing narrative to reveal what he calls the movies’ “hidden anatomy.” Certainly, he will have superb material to work with. On…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
Recently, ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad-boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good-boy” penguin,…
Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern-fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is dynamite;…
If your name ends in a vowel and your people came over in steerage a hundred years ago, you will almost certainly find yourself in the kitchen these days, wooden spoon in hand, plum tomatoes draining in the colander, thoughts drifting between sweet nostalgia and the malaise of indefinable loss…
Devotees of grim drama and great acting are in for a treat this Saturday, September 20, when the 1964 British classic The Pumpkin Eater screens at the Tattered Cover Free Film Series at the Starz FilmCenter. Adapted from a best-selling novel of the day by Penelope Mortimer, it features Anne…
