The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition: It tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and a whopping ghost…
As witch movies go–even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies –Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena. There are no ritual murders, resurrected warlocks or conventions of hags bent on turning the world’s children into mice. Director Griffin Dunne (1997’s Addicted to Love) can’t scare up a single bedeviled infant…
In The Eel, which won the Palme D’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who’s struggling with his past after eight…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak. His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he has a…
Thursday October 8 We’re on the verge of depression season, when shorter days and gloomy weather seem to bring out the worst in people. But that doesn’t mean you have to sit there and take it like a bout of the flu. Today is National Depression Screening Day, which means…
There are 22 globe-trotting characters in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt. But when the Tony Award-winning Denver Center Theatre Company opens its season with the play this week, only four actors–all men dressed austerely in business suits–will be interpreting the roles. It’s the main quirk of Scottish theater director…
The owners of the Elle never intended for it to be a mostly lesbian bar, but somehow it ended up that way. Over the past three and a half years, the club, located at the corner of Speer and Colfax, in the heart of Denver, has grown into something of…
Eight years ago Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp hired his old friend Craig Miller, with whom he had worked at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to put together a design collection at the DAM. The museum had accumulated a hundred years’ worth of chairs, vases and candlesticks, but…
For better or worse, the wobbly wheel of sexual politics as entertainment appears to be shimmying out of control. Prurient as it may be, theatergoers’ interest in sexual power plays is hardly a twentieth-century phenomenon. Even 2,400 years ago, the subject occupied center stage in such bedroom farces as Aristophanes’s…
With all that is truly scandalous in the movies these days–namely the dimwit dramaturgy and the anything-for-a-buckism that passes for Hollywood entertainment–it is something of a shock to realize that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to offend. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne,…
The 21st edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the United Artists Colorado Center Theatre with an opening-night screening of The Theory of Flight, Paul Greenglass’s study of the friendship between a brooding artist (Kenneth Branagh) and a young woman with Lou…
Better call out the symbol police. And tell them to bring heavy weapons. Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rites, a tale of young love and early disillusionment set in the overheated Louisiana bayou country, features an unseen rat gnawing away, all movie long, at the woodwork of a one-room house…
Go ahead. Drop a tab or two of windowpane before setting out to see Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai. A hit at Park City, Utah’s alternative Slamdance Film Festival this year, Mungia’s no-budget first feature is a trippy melange of many movies, everything from Mad Max to Star Wars to the…
Even passing rock fans know that there’s a precedent for mixing classical music and rock. The most obvious example is Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”; a less successful example would be the entire career of the Electric Light Orchestra. And even if there weren’t an established bloodline, anyone who has…
Keeping a non-profit alive for 25 years is far from child’s play. The Children’s Museum of Denver spent its first couple of years in a truck carrying arts, crafts and science exhibits around Denver and Adams counties. In 1975 the museum settled in rented space on Bannock Street, where it…
Thursday October 1 On the brink of a new century, Angelique Kidjo is doing her best to fuse an aural deluge of old and new music styles from around the world into a pop genre that’s powerfully modern–and you can dance to it. Kidjo blends South African harmonies, synthesized hip-hop…
Words may be the currency of the 1990s in the same way money was the lingua franca of the 1980s. Never has this been more clear than in the political crisis that has reached a dramatic pitch in recent weeks. We’ve all heard President Clinton “parse” his words, while his…
Based on a familiar legend packed with graphic sexual references and written almost entirely in verse, David Ives’s play Don Juan in Chicago is a wholly fictionalized, occasionally amusing look at contemporary sexual mores. And if your idea of a rip-roaring good time includes listening to such thigh-slappers as “Do…
Ever-admiring of her husband’s pioneering spirit but increasingly contemptuous of his overriding ambition, a young wife reacts to one of her mate’s first scientific discoveries by murmuring, “In these moments with you, I understand the allure. They say that man was meant for the earth, but I think you are…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-Western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests like John Dahl’s Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, James Foley’s After Dark,…
