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February 5-11, 2009
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  A Boy and His Dog (1975)
In 2024, following World War IV’s devastation, young Vic is reduced to scavenging for scraps and sex with the help and sardonic patter of his dog, Blood. Rated R. At International Film Series.
Angels in the Dust
HIV is still rampant in many parts of Africa. Nearly 20 years ago, Marion and Con Cloiete decided to leave their comfortable Johannesburg suburb to start an orphanage called Boikarabelo. Not rated. At International Film Series.
Body and Soul (1924)
Directed by the best-known African-American filmmaker of the silent era, this melodramatic story is concerned with the gamblers, bootleggers and “Jackleg” preachers who exploited the deep religiosity of poor African-Americans. It focuses on one corrupt minister as he extorts money, betrays a young girl and commits murder. Unable to get the film passed by New York censors, Micheau was forced to cut the film and add a confusing sequence to the end. Not rated. At Boulder Public Library. —BPL Film Program
Bride Wars
This charmless film concerns two lifelong friends, played by Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, whose competing weddings, mistakenly scheduled for the same day at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, turn bride-to-be against bride-to-be. Half the comedies made in Hollywood are based on the premise of boy-men acting like idiots. Switching the gender and toning down the vulgarity to a PG level offers only change, not improvement. Hathaway in particular deserves better material. Rated PG (suggestive content, language and some rude behavior). At Flatiron. — Michael Phillips
Chocolate
Thai director Prachya Pinkaew returns with a drama about an autistic girl named Zen who learns martial arts from watching TV shows and has an uncanny ability to catch flying objects. Armed with her unique skills, Zen sets out to help her cancer-stricken mother by collecting on debts her mother was owed. The astonishing action sequences are performed without special effects or stunt doubles. Rated R. At International Film Series.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
This is a tall tale of a man aging in reverse while bobbing serenely on life’s unpredictable seas. The colorful supporting characters spill their guts to the wonder of nature played by Brad Pitt, as he begins his life a very old man, ages into late-middle age, ripens into... well, Brad Pitt, then embarks on the big fade into childhood, infancy and check-out time. It’s worth seeing because the sights are truly something. As with his earlier Zodiac, director David Fincher applies the right technology in the right way. Rated PG-13 (brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking). At Flatiron, Twin Peaks and Colony Square. — Michael Phillips
Defiance
Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber portray two of the four Bielski brothers, Jewish farmers and smugglers who led more than 1,000 Jews to safety in a Belarusian forest during the Holocaust. It’s gripping true-life material, although director Edward Zwick and his writers tart things up with some dubious Hollywood-style mythmaking. Rated R (violence and language). At Flatiron and Century. — Michael Phillips
Doubt
A deft, beautifully built play has made it to the screen with its dramatic juice intact. John Patrick Shanley adapted and directed his stage piece set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, pitting Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Flynn, who’s suspected of an improper student relationship. Rated PG-13 (thematic material). At Mayan. — Michael Phillips
Frost/Nixon
Director Ron Howard’s screen version of the Peter Morgan play allows Michael Sheen and Frank Langella to re-create their stage roles as David Frost and Richard Nixon, respectively. Frost’s people paid Nixon’s people $600,000 for the disgraced former president to sit for a series of television interviews taped in 1977, not quite three years after Nixon resigned. Watching Frost lock rhetorical horns with his subject made for a riveting postmortem on a fall from power. Howard’s film pours old-fashioned theatrical juice into a cinematic bottle and lets the actors drink it up. Rated R (some language). At Century. — Michael Phillips
 Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood’s performance as a reclusive Korean War veteran toughing it out in a sketchy Detroit-area neighborhood may well lead to his first Academy Award for acting. But we’ll have to assume he’s winning it for richer assignments en route. After the vet’s young neighbor (Bee Vang) breaks into his garage to steal the car for which this film is named, our hero sets out to teach the boy how to stand up to his venal gangsta cousins. Some of this is affecting and painful in the right way; a lot of it is just cheap. Rated R (language throughout and some violence). At Flatiron, Century and Colony Square. — Michael Phillips
Happy-Go-Lucky
This is accomplished director Mike Leigh’s most buoyantly comic feature, and it’s a marvelous showcase for Sally Hawkins, who stars as the perpetually cheery Poppy, a grade-school teacher in North London. Happy-Go-Lucky is an ode to the power of irrational exuberance, and Leigh keeps the narrative machinery to a minimum. Everything is a bit neat, but a lot of Leigh’s work tends toward a heightened theatrical neatness. When it works, the result is a slice of life that, in terms of honest cinematic storytelling, is more like a slice of cake. Rated R (language). At Starz. — Michael Phillips
Hotel for Dogs
A teen girl (Emma Roberts) and her younger brother (Jake T. Austin) are placed in the dubious foster care of two headbangers (Lisa Kudrow, Kevin Dillon), all the while keeping their Jack Russell terrier a secret from their alleged caregivers. One day they discover a condemned hotel where a few strays have set up shop, and the kids and their newfound human pals get to work rehabbing the joint while avoiding police. This mildly entertaining film is loosely based on a Lois Duncan book that dealt with far less gimmickry. Rated PG (brief mild thematic elements, language and some crude humor). At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. — Michael Phillips
Inkheart
Brendan Fraser plays a single dad able to usher characters out of books and into the real world. Years earlier, his wife disappeared into a fantasy called Inkheart, trading places with a street performer (Paul Bettany). Dad and his daughter are now being stalked in preparation for the arrival of the fearsome “Shadow.” Inkheart was a crowded book to start with, and the film retains most of author Cornelia Funke’s story complications. It’s a mixed bag and a serious load for a movie to carry without audibly grunting. Rated PG (fantasy adventure action, some scary moments and brief language). At Flatiron. — Michael Phillips
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Directed by Robert Aldrich, with Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leacham, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart. Film noir doesn’t get much darker than this classic, adapted from pulp fiction authored by Mickey Spillane with Mike Hammer as an investigative vigilante. Fraught with symbolic allusions to Cold War fear and nuclear paranoia, it has all the elements of great film noir: destructive femmes fatales, low-life gangsters and expressionistic cinematography by the acclaimed Ernest Laszlo. At Boulder Public Library. — BPL Film Program
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 Starz.
Milk
The story of Harvey Milk is a tragedy, but not since Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High has Sean Penn played such a serenely happy individual. Penn is superb as the martyred San Francisco city supervisor, America’s first widely acknowledged openly gay elected official. He was killed by Milk’s former colleague, Dan White (Josh Brolin, also excellent), minutes after White’s fatal shooting of Mayor George Moscone in 1978. Rated R (language, some sexual content and brief violence). At Mayan. — Michael Phillips
New in Town
This is The Pajama Game without the songs, the laughs or the realism. If you recall that brash, likable 1954 musical or its film version, the story involved a male factory foreman squaring off against a female union rep in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. New in Town goes the other way: female boss, male union rep. Renee Zellweger plays a hotshot Miami businesswoman whose firm assigns her to oversee a workforce reduction at a food-processing plant in New Ulm, Minn. Easygoing Harry Connick Jr. plays the union rep. Rated PG (language and some suggestive material). At Flatiron and Century. — Michael Phillips
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Kevin James plays a mall security guard trying to stop a Black Friday robbery scheme. Underneath all the cartoonish mall mayhem and silly slapstick lies a comedy that aspires to be the sort of gentle crowd-pleaser John Hughes used to make, had the filmmakers been more willing to sacrifice some of James’ rolling-and-tumbling time. Rated PG (some violence, mild crude and suggestive humor and language). At Flatiron and Century. — Glenn Whipp
Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme’s most bracing narrative feature since The Silence of the Lambs combines a wedding with a tense family reunion, starring Anne Hathaway as a recovering addict returning home for her sister’s nuptials. A triumph of ambience, this is the first Demme film since the 1980s that feels like a party — bittersweet, but a party nonetheless. Rated R (language and brief sexuality). At Starz. — Michael Phillips
The Reader
Kate Winslet stars in the film version of Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel about a 15-year-old West German boy who, in 1958, embarks on an affair with a 36-year-old trolley conductor with more on her mind, and in her past, than she admits. The novel was hugely popular as well as controversial worldwide and an Oprah’s Book Club selection besides. However, it needed a different set of interpreters to make any emotional sense of it on screen. Even in the scenes dominated by Winslet, you never quite believe the way anything unfolds. Rated R (some scenes of sexuality and nudity). At Colony Square and Chez Artiste. — Michael Phillips
Revolutionary Road
However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel — an excoriating portrait of a mid-1950s marriage built on sticks, straw and delusion — inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of the story, rather than digging into its guts. But when stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet unleash their character’s demons, Revolutionary Road loses its tight, controlled sense of composition and air of solemnity and, in human terms, matters. Rated R (language and for some sexual content/nudity). At Century, Colony Square and Esquire. — Michael Phillips
Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire is a ruthlessly effective paean to destiny, leaving nothing to chance. It also has a good shot at winning this year’s Academy Award for best picture, if the pundits have anything to say about it. Every arrow plucked from director Danny Boyle’s quiver takes aim at the same objective: to leave you exhausted but wowed. An 18-year-old (Dev Patel) in the former Bombay, India, is suspected of cheating his way to national fame on the Hindi version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Rated R (some violence, disturbing images and some language). At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square, Esquire and Chez Artiste. — Michael Phillips
Street of Shame (1956)
Five prostitutes work at Dreamland in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district. As the Diet considers a ban on prostitution, the women play out their daily dramas. Each has dreams and motivations. One is married with an unemployed husband and a child. Another is a widow who uses her earnings to raise and support her son, who’s now old enough to work and care for her. An aging prostitute has a man who wants to marry her. A fourth saves her money diligently to pay her debt and get out, and also has a suitor who wants to marry her — though she has other plans for him. The fifth is the most devil-may-care, until her father comes from Kobe to bring her news of her family and ask her to come home. Based on the novel Susaki no Onna by Kôgo Noda. In Japanese with subtitles. At Boulder Public Library. — BPL Film Program
Taken
See full screen review on page 37. Rated PG-13. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.
The Uninvited
See full screen review on page 37. Rated PG-13. At Flatiron, Century, Colony Square and Twin Peaks.
Waltz with Bashir
An extraordinary achievement and a true visual feast, Ari Folman’s animated Waltz With Bashir is a detective story as well as an moral inquiry into the specific horrors of one war (the 1982 Lebanon War), and one man’s buried memories of it. It’s personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. Rated R (some disturbing images of atrocities, strong violence, brief nudity and a scene of graphic sexual content). Rated R. At Century and Chez Artiste. — Michael Phillips
The Wrestler
This film spends 105 minutes grappling at the edge of camp, cheap laughs and cliches. Yet the way it’s handled by director Darren Aronofsky and especially by Mickey Rourke — who really should get an Oscar for his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a steroid-addled sweetie in tights — it stays honest and keeps on fighting. An aging, down-on-his luck pro grappler, The Ram has heart problems, but The Wrestler does not. It’s sincere, violent, sentimental, predictable and extremely effective. Rated R (violence, sexuality/nudity, language and some drug use). At Century, Colony Square and Mayan. — Michael Phillips
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