Rocky Mountain Movies & Denver Movie Review 
 FOR MOVIE LOVERS WHO AREN'T EASILY SWEPT AWAY
Willem Dafoe plays a Greek shipping magnate in The Birthday Party , another barbed critique of life among the obscenely rich. Basing his movie on a 2007 novel by Panos Karnezis , writer/director Miguel Angel Jimenez creates a fictionalized view of a character who resembles Aristotle Onassis. Aways adventurous, Dafoe plays Marcos Timoleon, a calculating boss who’s accustomed to controlling…
Put Jeff Daniels , Jared Harris , and J.K. Simmons in the same movie, and you’ve created interest - at least among those who value capable acting. In The Brink of War , Daniels plays Ronald Reagan; Harris appears as Mikhail Gorbachev, and Simmons portrays George Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State. In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik for a summit meant to tackle issues of nuclear…
Remember the horror series Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ? The original starred Billy Preston, an actress who has vanished from public view. Obligatory sequels followed, establishing the Camp Miasma movies as a horror staple that wore out its welcome. Stop scanning your memory. There never was a Camp Miasma series, but director Jane Schoenbrun bases her movie -- Teenage Sex and Death at…
Advanced publicity for T he End of Oak Street blames a mysterious cosmic event for transporting a typical American suburban neighborhood to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Anne Hathaway , who seems to be everywhere this summer, and Ewan McGregor , who lately has been working in TV series, star as husband and wife in a high-concept job that keeps them on the run. Director David Robert…
It's not unusual for a family to go through a crisis. But what if every day presented a crisis of some sort? I ask the question by way of introducing Olmo , a movie about a Mexican-American family living in Las Cruces, N.M. in 1979. Aivan Uttapa plays the title character, a young man who is often called upon to care for his quadriplegic father ( Gustavo Sánchez Parra ). Burdened by the need to…
B oasting a blatantly contrived high-concept premise, One Night Only is better than it ought to be. At the same time, the movie — which rides on agreeable performances from Monica Barbaro and Collum Tower — isn’t the winning charmer it might have been. The contrivance: One Night Only , directed by Will Gluck and written by Travis Baum, creates a world in which unmarried people are subject to an…
Eli Roth has directed notable horror movies, among them Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel ( 2005). He's also produced such helpings of horror as Clown (2014) and Haunt (2019). Now, Roth arrives with I ce Cream Man , a horror movie that tries to cut the heart out of idyllic, small-town life when a smiling ice cream man ( Ari Millen ) turns the town's kids into killers. Ice Cream Man tries to walk the…
In the summer of 1975, a callow 19-year-old from New Jersey traveled to Provincetown, Mass., a certified mecca of free-style living. Tony (later to become celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain ) spent the summer working in restaurants and partying. At the time, Bourdain was dealing with rejection for a writing fellowship at Vassar, the college he attended. But that didn't stop him from…
When a movie entitled The Samurai and the Prisoner arrives, it's fair to expect ample swordplay. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa defies that expectation in a big way. Adapting a 2021 novel by Honobu Yonezawa , Kurosawa's 16th-century period piece offers more talk than action, much of it concerning intrigue inside a castle that's about to be overrun by a powerful warlord. Although the movie contains one…
As far as Spider-Man is concerned, the world has amnesia. Still heralded as a crime fighter, Spider-Man has become a loner. Even his closest friends have forgotten that he’s also Peter Parker, a nice guy from Queens. To clarify: The collective loss of memory that underlies Spider-Man: Brand New Day stems from developments at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), the previous installment of…
The loss of a child is serious business, but director Hirokazu Kore-eda treats the subject gently in Sheep in the Box, a fable bolstered by a touch of sci-fi. Kore-eda's screenplay involves a humanoid, a robot child that enters the movie to ease the pain of two grieving parents ( Daigo Yamamoto and Haruka Ayase ). A company called Rebirth contacts the grieving couple. The company creates an exact…
The Dink , a movie about a former tennis wiz reduced to playing pickleball, is a cheerfully bland comedy about a game that has swept the country. Jake Johnson plays Dustin Boyd, a loser who works as a junior tennis instructor at a country club run by his father ( Ed Harris ). A tough old bird, Dad regards his son as a failure. An ill-fated match with Andy Roddick ended teenage Dustin's promising…
Erika Tracy is a Los Angeles art star. Just ask her. As played by Olivia Wilde , Erika becomes the driving force in I Want Your Sex , director Gregg Arak i's satirical look at a conceptual artist who hires a floundering 23-year-old college graduate ( Cooper Hoffman ) as a studio assistant. Delighted to land a job, Hoffman's Elliott gets more than he bargained for when Erika bluntly proposes that…
Collaborating on a screenplay with Marjorie David , Israeli director Eran Riklis tells a story of academic oppression in Iran, basing his movie on a best-selling memoir by Azar Nafisi. In 1979, Nafisi ( Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband ( Arash Marandi ) returned to Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini had just come to power, and Nafisi -- along with many other returnees -- leaned toward the notion that a…
You've already seen The Odyssey . You've probably seen it many times. I'm not talking about filmed versions, one in 1954 and another in 1997. I'm talking about movies that -- knowingly or not -- have retold the Odyssey story, if not literally, then by mimicking its structure. You know the drill. A valiant hero is separated from all that's familiar to him. He must overcome many obstacles to achieve…
Night Nurse takes place inside a high-end assisted living facility where some residents have a nurse with them at all times -- one serving during the day and another at night. Many of the residents suffer from dementia. From the outset, director Georgia Bernstein makes it clear that she's not interested in exposing elder-care abuse. Heavy on atmospherics, Night Nurse embarks on a study of how…
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass bring s a slapdash quality to a comedy that opts for a glut of gags that bob on a sea of silliness. Director David Wain ( Wet Hot American Summer ) delivers a preposterous story, unremitting goofiness, and a disregard for credibility, driving his movie to zany extremes. There's something refreshing about a movie without pretensions, but the problem with a…
I already knew that Penelope Cruz can be a terrific comic actress, but The Invite , a movie about sex and relationships, reminded me how good she can be. I can’t say I’m a huge Seth Rogen fan, but he gives what might be hi s best performance in this Olivia Wilde -directed movie. Wilde also has a starring role. Essentially, The Invit e is a four-hander with Edward Norton joining the group as a…
In Maddie's Secret , director John Early plays the lead character, a woman dealing with a long-standing eating disorder, in this case, bulimia. A comedian, actor, and singer, Early's sex isn't the secret to which the movie' s title refers. Early plays a female character. That’s it. The movie’s secret involves Maddie's bulimia, a condition she has been hiding for years. Maddie works in the food…
— A massive orange blob of a monster tries to devour much of Hollywood. — Images of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Dooley Wilson, who played Sam the piano player in Casablanca 's Rick's Cafe, flicker by. — An animated George Lucas under glass asks to be released from his display at a museum. — Georges Milies's A Trip to the Moon crops up . All of that and more can be found in Minions &…
Director Alice Winocour takes us to Paris for fashion week in Couture , a movie that tells three loosely related stories, one featuring Angelina Jolie . Perhaps you can already sense a problem. By having to switch the movie's focus from one character to another, Winocour loses the opportunity for in-depth looks at any of them, and Couture becomes more of a skim than a revelation. Jolie plays…
Boots Riley directed an impressive and entertaining debut film with 2018' s Sorry to Bother You , an eye-popping critique of telemarketing that hit a broad range of satirical targets. Riley boosted his distinctive aesthetic -- bold colors, sight gags, and preposterous turns of plot -- with giddy bursts of energy. Riley returns with I Love Boosters , a movie about women who steal clothing from a…
Here we go again. DC Comics has added a new name to what feels like an infinite number of comic-book villains. It almost seems as if there are as many villains as there are drug commercials on TV. Some of these fiends even have names that sound like missed opportunities for drug companies. I’m sure, for example, that you can imagine being encouraged to ask your doctor about Krem, complete with…
There's revisionism, and then there's revisionism writ so large that its undermining of expectation becomes a distraction. That's how I felt about director Michael Sarnoski 's T he Death of Robin Hood , a movie that shreds the Robin Hood myth while asking us to acknowledge the gulf between reality and the stories we tell to mask its brutalities. Five minutes into the unrelieved grimness Sarnoski…
Toy Story 5 manages to keep Pixar's animated franchise from slipping into irrelevance, no small feat considering the first Toy Story movie appeared 31 years ago. This edition renews the franchise by expanding the role of cowgirl heroine Jessie ( Joan Cusack ) and also presenting her with a love interest, Buzz Lightyear ( Tim Alle n). It’s not too early to think about wedding gifts. A comforting…