Colorado Springs is certainly not the first place that comes to mind when you think “avant-garde.” But Christopher May, the founder and primary curator of that city’s International Experimental Cinema Exposition, may have found a filmmaker who reconciles conservative values and artistic ferment. At 8 p.m. Saturday, Frank Biesendorfer will…
Anybody who’s cracked open a recent Disney G-rated DVD has probably witnessed the ultimate in sequelmania. On the Lilo & Stitch release, for instance, the feature was preceded — skippably, thank God — by Inspector Gadget 2, trailers for The Jungle Book 2, Atlantis 2: Milo’s Return, 101 Dalmatians II:…
From the ashes of the late Denver Jazz on Film Festival rises the Denver Jazz on Film Series, a slightly shorter — but no less syncopated — bow to a great American art form as interpreted by moviemakers around the world. The series, which features twelve films ranging from a…
The first feature film by 34-year-old Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Intacto, is a complex meditation on luck, fate and the torments of memory. It has some opaque moments, and once in a while it gives off a whiff of film-school pretension. But the young Spaniard looks like a force…
Virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, but the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American has now been made into a disturbing and…
In the 1970s, director Werner Herzog helped energize West Germany’s film renaissance with a brilliant variety of personal visions — a condemnation of the Spanish conquistadors and imperialism in general (Aguirre, the Wrath of God); a semi-obscene parody of everyday life enacted by dwarfs (Even Dwarfs Started Small); and a…
You can bet your portfolio — what’s left of it — that the makers of The Bank, an Australian techno thriller about a zillion-dollar stock-market scam, are counting on the vast ill will created by the Enron scandal, the WorldCom mess and the lesser offspring of corporate malfeasance to build…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the twelve- to eighteen-year-old demographic hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel before the official sequel’s release this…
On the eve of a controversial war in Iraq, Stanley Kubrick’s superior black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Friday through Thursday at the Madstone Theaters at Tamarac Square) serves as both caution and comic relief. Since its release in 1964, this…
Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are: the Top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery a few years later that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
Once upon a time, in the town of Darkness Falls… “Wait,” you’re probably saying to yourself, “Darkness Falls is the name of the town?” Yes. Yes it is. And it’s haunted by an evil tooth fairy. Are you sure you want to know more? Okay, good. Because once you get…
It’s easy to see the subtle brilliance of Gene Hackman’s acting whenever we revisit modern classics such as The French Connection or The Conversation. This plain-faced master of character brings to the role of a grubby, dogged New York cop or a desolate surveillance expert all the low, discomfiting details…
Paul Morse (Jason Lee) has this terrible problem: He’s all set to marry take-charge, raven-haired beauty Karen (Selma Blair, thanklessly playing second fiddle as usual), but late in the game finds himself also falling for her free-spirited blond cousin, Becky (Julia Stiles). Gee, what’s a guy to do? It’s always…
It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman — yes, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional…
Nicolas Roeg’s wonderfully tricky horror movie Don’t Look Now, set amid the crumbling splendor of Venice, was made in 1973; for three decades, it has attracted an ever-expanding cult intrigued by its grown-up frights and relentless eroticism. Madstone Theaters will screen Roeg’s occult thriller Friday and Saturday night at 9:30…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form. Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter till he fell into the pile of easy money made…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
There have been a number of films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but it omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And although others have tried over the years, each tended…
They’re both gone now, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder, but they leave behind the bittersweet legacy of such Hollywood gems as Some Like It Hot and Fortune Cookie. The best of all their collaborations, perhaps, is The Apartment (1960), in revival Friday, January 3, at the Starz FilmCenter. It’s a…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The ribald Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version is likely to win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie…
Based on the true story of three young aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
