The long collaboration between the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his alter ego, actor Toshiro Mifune, was one of the most fruitful in all of film history: The ideal vessel for Kurosawa’s ideas and obsessions — from the definition of classic Samurai honor to modern man’s need for compassion…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged from the mid-nineteenth-century cauldron of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring,…
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A miracle in midnight-movie finery; a spot-on analysis of adolescent ambition, gender struggles and xenophobia; an eternal pop-culture time capsule: Richard O’Brien’s madcap musical, adapted with and directed by Jim Sharman, offers participation-primed audiences — who aren’t sounding their smartest these days — the secret…
Each of the beautifully made vignettes that make up Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity glimpses a young woman caught at a crossroads, faced with an important decision and about to experience one of those rare dilations of vision that can change an entire life. Now, this is a common ploy in…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay, but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The Italian film director Luchino Visconti once said that the only thing that really counts on the screen is “an expression of the burden of being human.” Of all his work, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), which is showing in revival Friday through December 19 at the Starz FilmCenter,…
Robert De Niro always did love an acting challenge, but lately those challenges have been less along the lines of “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “…as we go through the movie, there’s all little funny moments like Jango bumping his head because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers bumps…
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) is rightly famous (and notorious) as the most powerful propaganda film ever made: a documentary account of the Nazis’ massive, staged-for-the-camera Nuremberg rallies of 1934. The film glorifies Adolf Hitler and propagates the myth of German “purity” so skillfully that to this day…
Christ is sexy. There — got your attention. But honestly, think about it: nice guy, pretty hair, carpentry skills, puts loaves (and fishes) on the table. Plus all that doing miracles and rising from the dead and being the Son of God business. Heck, he’d be a prime catch for…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless, the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make a…
John Ford’s beautifully crafted classic 1956 Western, The Searchers, opens Friday for a one-week run at Tamarac Square’s Madstone Theaters. This tale of a bitter Texan Civil War veteran named Ethan Edwards (ideally played by John Wayne) who undertakes a five-year search for a niece who’s been abducted by Indians…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge from the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor¹s Club, the notion remains alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that the…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all. How could they? The people whose names they sought weren’t listed; their contributions weren’t cited; their influences weren’t credited. So even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search…
After more than 400 books, countless TV documentaries and half a dozen movies, can the huge, untidy pile of dark speculations about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination support one more theory? Writer/director Neil Burger thinks so. Shot with a hand-held camera in jittery mock-doc style, Interview With the Assassin (opening…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie? Is it as charming, visually gratifying and faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be “yep” times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for…
The current TV ad campaign for the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding plays cleverly on the film’s cross-cultural appeal by substituting the words “Italian,” “Jewish” and “Russian” for “Greek.” The implication: A person from any ethnic or religious background will relate to this story’s characters, drama and humor…
Movie buffs who are in the mood for a little blood, deceit and darkness need look no further than this week’s second annual Longmont Film Festival, which presents three film noir classics Thursday and Friday at the Longmont Performing Arts Center, 513 Main Street. At 7 p.m. Thursday, Colorado Public…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down cleavages, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…
With Frida — the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo — it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it). But that’s the first and last cynical comment of…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon (the scourge, the Antichrist, the Vanilla Ice of the ’90s — take your pick) has been rendered beloved. When they, slick bizzers in suits with cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man,…
