Air Guitar Nation
Air Guitar Nation is the feature documentary about the year that air guitar swept America from New York to Los Angeles and then all the way to nothern Finland. The film chronicles the birth of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships and the personal journeys of those talented contestants who are vying to become the first World Air Guitar Champion from the United States. Full of triumph and disappointment, patriotic spirit and political tension — and of course invisible guitars — this tension-filled competition quickly turns very real as the contest becomes fierce. At Boulder Public Library. — Denver Film Society

An American Carol
With an obvious jab at Michael Moore, An American Carol portrays an anti-American filmmaker who wants to abolish the Fourth of July as a national holiday. In the night, he is visited by three spirits who guide him through the true meaning of America. Rated PG-13. At Century and Colony Square.

Appaloosa
This leisurely, off-and-on buddy Western, set in the New Mexico territory in 1882, stars Ed Harris (who also co-wrote the screenplay and directed) as a gunslinger who goes up against a ruthless rancher (Jeremy Irons). This film could have used a real sense of danger to go along with all the neat, tidy, highfalutin’ honor and decency. Rated R (some violence and language). At Flatiron, Colony Square and Century. — Michael Phillips

Battle in Seattle
A film based on the Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization. Rated R. At Chez Artiste.

Beauty in Trouble
Effectively rendered destitute by the floods that washed through Prague in 2002, struggling young father and husband Jarda (Roman Luknár) eventually resorts to stripping stolen cars as a means of supporting his impoverished family. Jarda’s wife Marcela (Ana Geislerová) is having difficulty accepting her husband’s nefarious new career though, and before long she is packing her bags and rounding up the kids to seek shelter with her mother. Life at her mother’s house isn’t easy thanks to the constant presence of her mean-spirited step-father Richard (Jirí Schmitzer), but it simply seems as if there is no place left to go and Marcela’s options have run dry. Not rated. At International Film Series. — Denver Film Society

Beverly Hills Chihuahua
A pampered chihuahua from Beverly Hills becomes lost in the mean streets of Mexico. Seriously. Rated PG. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.

Blindness
A disparate group of citizens in a large city are afflicted by sudden sightlessness, and the world around them becomes chaos. The government confines the afflicted to an asylum, and much of this film concerns the battle between Ward One, run like a caring commune by a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his take-charge wife (Julianne Moore), and the louts running Ward Three, headed by a bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) and an accountant (Maury Chaykin). Jose Saramago’s good, challenging book doesn’t quite make the jump to the big screen. Rated R (violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity).  At Flatiron, Century and Twin Peaks. — Michael Phillips

Body of Lies
A CIA operative uncovers a lead on a terrorist operating out of Jordan in this film based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ 2007 novel. Rated R. At Century, Flatiron, Colony Square and Twin peaks.

Burn After Reading
An imperious former spook (John Malkovich) accuses his blackmailers (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) of heading a “league of morons,” in the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen. As in all Coen japes, stupid has at least a 40 percent chance of getting you killed in spectacularly violent fashion. But the cosmic joke being played on the morons here isn’t much fun in the telling. Rated R (pervasive language, some sexual content, and violence). At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Esquire. — Michael Phillips

Call Response
Call Response is a feature length documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. Call Response takes viewers deep undercover where slavery is thriving — from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India — and reveals that in 2007, slave traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined. Luminaries on the issue such as Madeleine Albright, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first-hand accounts of this 21st-century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers and Rocco Deluca move this disturbing information into inspiration for stopping it. Former child soldier and current African hip-hop celebrity, Emanuel Jal, gives a chilling performance recounting his experiences and calling for help for others experiencing destruction in Uganda and Sudan. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing. Not rated. At Starz. — Denver Film Society

Choke
The long-awaited film adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) novel. In it, Victor Mancini spends his days working at a Colonial-era theme park and his nights pretending to choke at upscale restaurants. When patrons “save” him, they feel responsible for his life and send him money. Oh, and he’s a complete sex addict. Rated R. At Mayan.

City of Ember
Two teens hunt for the secret of their underground city’s existence in order to save it from darkness. Rated PG. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.

The Duchess
This film dramatizes Amanda Foreman’s popular biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (played by Keira Knightley), a cultishly adored (and sometimes loathed) celebrity of the 18th century known for her outspoken politics as much as her influence over British fashions. The Duchess is a beautifully crafted period piece, but it’s also disturbingly shallow, focused so tightly on one woman’s feelings of repression and loneliness that it lacks any perspective on her causes. Rated PG-13 (sexual content, brief nudity and thematic material). At Century, Chez Artiste and Mayan. — Tasha Robinson

Eagle Eye
Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are dragooned into a vast cyber conspiracy involving a super-secret Pentagon surveillance weapon that’s basically a humorless female version of HAL 9000. The screenplay tries like the devil to get you all fussed up about omnivorous cyber-surveillance on a scale George Orwell never imagined, but the result is a hyperactive jumble that fails to whip up the right mixture of dread and propulsion. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of action and violence and for language). At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. — Michael Phillips

The Edge of Heaven
There are six principal characters in The Edge of Heaven: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by the German writer-director Fatih Akin (which won the best screenplay award in Cannes last year) children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider. Yet at the same time, as the lives of the characters cross and entwine, there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life. At International Film Series. — A.O. Scott

The Exiles
The Exiles is the story of one wild-but-typical night in the lives of three young American Indians who have left their reservations to live in downtown Los Angeles. It presents the lifestyles and actions of these people that are “not true of all Indians of the time… but typical of many.” Starting at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, Yvonne, a young, pregnant Apache, wanders around the shops of Grand Central Food Market in downtown Bunker Hill, L.A., as she gazes through glass windows that provide the barrier between her mundane existence and the unattainable. The film follows Yvonne, her husband Homer (Hualapi) and Tommy, a Mexican who lives with them, through 14 hours of their everyday life. With the fall of night comes the drinking, card-playing, picking up girls, fighting and dancing of the boys — juxtaposed against Yvonne’s lonely, uneventful existence. These two scenarios sum up the confused lives of a group that was part of a new generation caught between opposing forces — the past versus modern day living. Not rated. At Starz. — Denver Film Society

The Express
This film recounts the story of Ernie Davis, who overcame poverty and racism to win college football’s Heisman Trophy in 1961. Rated PG. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.

Flash of Genius
A man takes on the entire Detroit auto industry, claiming they stole his idea for the intermittent windshield wiper. Rated PG-13. At Flatiron and Century.

Ghost Town
Here’s a welcome surprise: a supernatural romantic comedy that works, graced with a cast just off-center enough to make it distinctive. A freak accident during a routine colonoscopy takes a loner dentist (Ricky Gervais) to the other side for seven seconds. When he comes back, he can see and hear all the spirits of the dead caught in limbo with unfinished business. One such spirit (Greg Kinnear) promises to leave the dentist alone if he’ll break up the impending marriage of his widow (Tea Leoni). Rated PG-13 (some strong language, sexual humor and drug references). At Flatiron. — Michael Phillips

The Golden Goose (1964)
A boy living with his two brothers in a little village is mistreated by them. His brothers encounter an old woman who asks them for food. They rudely turn her away, but later the boy meets the same woman and gives her a meal. For his kindness he is given a golden goose with a strange property — all those who are prying, nosy, envious and rapacious get stuck to it and each other. Dubbed in English. Not rated. At Boulder Public Library. — Boulder Public Library Film Program

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
See full screen review on page 67. Rated R. At Flatiron, Centuryand Twin Peaks.

Love and Honor
Yoji Yamada’s Japanese drama Love and Honor (Bushi No Ichibun) follows the heartbreaking plight of Shinnojo (Yoji Yamada), a young man employed as a “food taster” for the imperial family. Shinnojo’s position comes to a sudden and tragic end when he consumes poisoned fish intended for the clan leader and is forever robbed of his sight. Forced to give up his job, Shinnojo thus heads home and sinks into a deep and seemingly inescapable depression. Contemplating suicide, Shinnojo is only stopped by the love of his wife, Kayo, who insists that she will also commit seppuku if he proceeds. Not rated. At International Film Series. — Denver Film Society

Man on Wire
A documentary that follows Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire routine performed between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City. The act was hailed as the “artistic crime of the century.” Rated PG-13. At Chez Artiste.

Miracle at St. Anna
Spike Lee tackles a great, sprawling subject, adapting James McBride’s novel about four African-American soldiers stranded behind enemy lines in WWII but welcomed by members of a besieged Tuscan community. Lee shoots the story, which spans wrenching battlefield realism and folkloric magical-realism flourishes, every which way, and the tone is uncertain. Why can’t he bring the same clarity and force to his fictional features that he does to his documentaries? Rated R (strong war violence, language and some sexual content/nudity). At Century. — Michael Phillips

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
See full screen review on page 67. Rated PG-13. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.

Nights in Rodanthe
A recently separated woman (Diane Lane) leaves her kids with her ex and heads to the scenic coastal burg of Rodanthe, N.C., where her pal owns the a picturesque inn. She’s there to spend time alone and prepare the inn for an incoming nor’easter, but the sole scheduled visitor is a doctor (Richard Gere) who recently lost a patient during a routine operation and has come to amends with the grieving widower (Scott Glenn). The result is a feather-light romance based on a feather-light novel by Nicholas Sparks. Rated PG-13 (some sensuality). At Flatiron, Century and Colony Square. — Michael Phillips

The Pool
The Pool is the story of Venkatesh, a “room boy” working at a hotel in Panjim, Goa, who sees from his perch in a mango tree a luxuriant garden and shimmering pool hidden behind a wall. In making whatever efforts he can to better himself, Venkatesh offers his services to the wealthy owner of the home. Not content to simply dream about a different life, Venkatesh is inquisitive about the home’s inhabitants — indeed about the world around him — and his curiosity changes the shape of his future. Working in Hindi with young actors and in a country obviously not his own, director/co-writer Chris Smith (Yes Men, American Movie) has nevertheless created a superbly incisive portrait. Not rated. At Starz. — Denver Film Society

Religulous
Bill Maher and director Larry Charles get a fair number of laughs as they take aim at religious extremism in many forms. Yet even if you share Maher’s skepticism on his subject, you may wish he’d set up his straight men and straight women in a way that doesn’t merely score the cheapest possible laughs. Rated R (some language and sexual material).  At Century and Esquire. — Michael Phillips

Save Me
Mark (Chad Allen) is a young gay man who is addicted to sex and drugs. After a particularly nasty binge his brother checks him into Genesis House, a Christian retreat in New Mexico miles from anywhere. Run by a compassionate husband-and-wife team, Gayle (Judith Light) and Ted (Stephen Lang) have made it their life’s mission to cure young men of their “gay affliction” through spiritual guidance. At first, Mark resists, but soon takes the message to heart and begins to bond with his fellow residents — in particular Scott (Robert Gant), a mentor charged with guiding Mark through his conversion. As their friendship evolves into romance, Mark and Scott are forced to confront their true selves, while Gayle and Ted find the values they hold as absolute truths to be threatened. Not rated. At Starz. — Denver Film Society

The Text of Light (1974)
Brakhage used single framing techniques to photograph a multiplicity of shifting colored light as refracted through a crystal ashtray, “turning light itself into cinematic images” (William C. Wees), and editing it into a work which slowly reveals metaphoric landscapes, skyscapes and cosmic movements. At Boulder Public Library. — Boulder Public Library Film Program


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