In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
There’s something curiously inanimate about Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, but it’s certainly not the luminous and thoroughly engaging Julie Christie. Here’s a film that means to meditate on the pitfalls of marriage in the Nineties using slyness and dark wit, but it comes off as bloodless as a blueprint. Only the…
The driven, drawling Texas preacher Robert Duvall portrays in The Apostle is the latest in his long line of true believers, good and evil. Often taken for granted, this extraordinary actor has, on TV and in movies, played Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann, Communist mass murderer Joseph Stalin, savior of…
Thursday January 22 New developments: The fruit of the lens–taken from every angle–blossoms tonight at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., where a reception to introduce a trio of new photographic exhibitions will take place from 7 to 10. The human form, one of photography’s…
Downtown Denver has been home to nearly all of the largest, most expensive and most important buildings constructed in the Rocky Mountain region over the past 100 years. It’s a history book written in stone. But there are some missing chapters. The buildings still standing in the central business district…
As murder mysteries go, the Country Dinner Playhouse staging of Agatha Christie’s The Hollow has much to recommend it. Bill McHale’s well-directed show features a stellar cast of veteran actors. What’s more, superb costumes from Nicole Hoof and a tasteful set by Craig Cline and Eric Lawrence create a feast…
Ask a professor of ancient history for an explanation of the architectural history of theaters, and he might tell you the large, circular dancing space that is the centerpiece of all Greek theaters took its inspiration from the threshing circles that Greek farmers have used for the last three millennia…
In the paranoid cosmology of Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, satanic evil is transmitted from person to person by casual touching, like typhoid or some rampant strain of the flu. Almost no one is immune in this deadly game of tag. Not fry cooks on their cigarette breaks, not award-winning teachers walking…
The superb British actor Alan Rickman, star of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sense and Sensibility, makes his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, a meditation on life, death and human relations that is as elusive as it is fascinating. It’s the kind of film that turns over in the mind,…
Thursday January 15 Voice of America: There’s something mighty special that differentiates a cowboy poet from all other bards–call it rugged individualism or manifest destiny, but it all boils down to a kind of agrarian authenticity. It won’t be hard to imagine campfire smoke wafting in the background when the…
New York-based artist and author Art Spiegelman is among the most important contemporary cartoonists in the world. And his considerable fame is based almost wholly on Maus, a sometimes hard-bound comic book first published in 1986 by Pantheon Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Maus is a masterpiece. The…
British playwright Harold Pinter once confessed that his ear for dialogue is something of an acquired talent: He gleans some of his material from conversations overheard in bars and restaurants. In that respect, he’s not much different from many other playwrights. However, what distinguishes Pinter from the horde of minutiae-obsessed…
The overwhelming success of the Broadway tap-dance extravaganza, Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk might disappoint, dismay or even shock some musical-theater purists: There’s no Fred Astaire clone as the show’s main character. Instead, the unorthodox musical offers us an abstraction–a solitary dancer known only as “‘da Beat”–as…
Does Robert De Niro presume to play free safety for the Jets? Can Denzel Washington slam dunk over Dikembe Mutombo? Well, no. But if Dennis Rodman gets a notion to do King Lear, better break out the swords. Because ever since Sonja Henie and her skates signed with Darryl F…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience: It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals and costumes. The film is about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese…
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of the fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has got to be the wettest movie in memory–wetter than…
Thursday January 8 Dear old Dodd: Director and playwright Terry Dodd knows it better than just about anyone else: “The World’s a Stage,” and to paraphrase someone more famous than Dodd, we’re the ones putting on a show. That’s the name of the talk Dodd will give this evening as…
Mark Sink is both a prominent Denver photographer and a member of a prominent local family. That explains why he’s a tuxedo-clad semi-regular on the society pages of the city’s dailies, typically seen in photographs with one or the other of his divorced parents. His father is Chuck Sink, an…
“Get yourself some puppets, put ’em on ice skates, and you’ll be a millionaire,” laments one character in the Avenue Theater’s interactive murder mystery Murder Most Fowl, a nine-year-old production that annually lampoons local celebrities and events. At a recent performance of the show, that line drew gentle laughter and…
Why does Denver need yet another theater company? What can a new group producing plays in a downtown storefront theater offer us that older, more established theaters aren’t already providing? People once asked those same questions about Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, formed during the Seventies by a handful of students…
Optimists confident that Prime Minister Tony Blair and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams would simply sit down to tea last month at 10 Downing Street and toss eight centuries of strife into history’s dustbin have another think coming. Last week, Irish nationalists inside notorious Maze Prison gunned down Billy Wright,…
It’s the New Woody Allen Movie. In capital letters. And even when the old clarinetist is playing slightly out of tune, as he is in Deconstructing Harry, it doesn’t make so much difference. Faithful as the Earth circling the sun, Allen’s comedies of anxiety keep on coming, one per year…
