Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as the protagonist or savior, but this is…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twenty-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. And more’s the pity,…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
There are a lot of tangled branches in the tap-dance tree — there are jazz, rhythm and show tap, to name a few of the principal limbs — but Ellie Sciarra’s not willing to sort them out. An athletic dancer with more than twenty years in and out of the…
When Stephen Keating picked up the cable and media beat at the The Denver Post in 1995, he didn’t realize that the industry was on the verge of revolutionary change. “I was lucky enough to be covering this just as it happened,” says Keating. “I didn’t have any foreknowledge or…
Bill Havu has put together a wild amusement park ride of a show called Women & Allegory at his prestigious William Havu Gallery in the Golden Triangle. The exhibit, which lasts through the weekend, features a quartet of artists who deal with both feminist and feminine imagery. The work, according…
For the last few years, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts has hosted exhibits downtown in the lobby of Republic Plaza — a feat that isn’t easy to pull off, since the lobby itself is a work of art. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the lobby is in…
It’s not hard to believe that the Devil has done earthly time as an erstwhile boxing promoter or even a professional critic, but did he really head up a Viennese Masonic lodge for fifty years? And has the same horned creature who’s rumored to frequent the power corridors of the…
The meticulous staging smartly echoes Oscar Wilde’s intellectual choreography, the costumes are resplendent, the setting is tastefully appointed and the actors are eager to relish each epigram and witticism. But even though director Len Kiziuk has paid dutiful attention to the vital elements that prop up The Importance of Being…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than thirty movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is, you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own promotional art. (This package is second only to Kevin Smith’s Dogma for foolishly trotting out…
Gunslingers, Ghosts and Gold: The Spirit of Denver Walking Tour. Daily except Tuesday, weather permitting, leaves from Eighteenth and Wynkoop streets, $15, call for times and reservations, 303-860-8687, http://atlas.csd.net/~deebeaux
The World Cinema Series, 10 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays through December 12 (excluding November 27 and 28) at the Chez Artiste, 4150 East Amherst Avenue. $7. Call 303-757-7161
Voters will have a chance to decide on two proposals during Tuesday’s election that should be of great interest to the art world. The first is a no-brainer. Who would begrudge the Denver Art Museum a lousy $62.5 million — about the price of one good Van Gogh — to…
It’s easy to think of Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art in Cherry Creek as a purveyor of paintings and sculpture from the region’s past, since a typical exhibit at the boutique style gallery showcases the work of deceased artists who were active in the early to mid-twentieth century. But Schlosser also…
A hundred years before terms like “mommy track” and “telecommuting” crept into the common parlance, German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker wrestled with an agonizing dilemma: Would she settle for being a stay-at-home mom who filled her few idle hours by sketching portraits, or would she fulfill her prodigious talent by…
Laden with postmodern gloom and narcissism, The Fastest Clock in the Universe is an offbeat play about “human cannibals” struggling to define themselves in a world bereft of meaning, sense or care. Despite the characters’ attempts to dial back the forces of time, they’re eventually compelled to reckon with the…
All hail. America is the seat of democracy and the world’s most mobile society — the place where a printer’s apprentice named Samuel Clemens can take a new name and remake himself as the country’s greatest satirist, where a geeky college dropout can become a software billionaire and shoeless boys…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
In the beginning, there were little people. If you understand that, you can begin to understand Charles Simonds and his work: unfired miniature clay structures that seem to have been left behind by some vanished civilization. Invented by Simonds, the intricately formed pieces first began popping up over twenty years…
