Now Showing - go here for the local movie schedule

Capsule reviews by Thomas Delapa (T.D.) or Ingrid Vogelfanger (I.V.), as indicated.

About A Boy. On its opening weekend, About a Boy had the unenviable distinction of battling the Star Wars sequel as well as Spider-Man, a fate I wouldn't wish on any movie. This faux British import-its directors are American Pie's Paul and Chris Weitz-might be described as Bridget Jones's Diary for guys. Hugh Grant stars as Will, a 38-year-old London layabout and serial skirt-chaser. From a book by Nick Hornby, Boy sluggishly charts Will's growth from cad into dad. The defining change in his reckless life isn't romance but an owl-faced boy (Nicholas Hoult) who's in dire need of a father. This is a movie for those who think that unrepentant single men are ideally reformed by having parenthood shoved down their throats. Guys beware: This movie may induce gagging. Bogged down with voice-over, About a Boy is about as muddled a film as I've seen in a while. Grant only connects when he's delivering his caustic jabs, and even then his timing is off. Rated PG-13. At Basemar Twin and NederlandCommunity Center Auditorium. -TD

Amélie. The publicity for this import touts that it has become one of France's biggest critical and commercial successes of recent years. Just remember: This is the same country where Jerry Lewis is revered as a comic genius. Amelie is the product of the fertile imagination of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, one-half of the directing team behind Delicatessen. His latest film is a love letter to Paris, to childhood fantasy and to the expressive language of cinema. But it's a letter that should be stamped "Contents: Perishable Froufrou." In her page-boy hairdo and elfin grin, actress Audrey Tautou is the movie's Gallic delicacy. She's Amelie, at 24 a shy Montmartre waitress. A narrator relates her life story, laced with droll details of the eccentric people around her. Francophiles may be the first to toast the film, if only for its postcard-pretty views of famous Paris sights. But Jeunet's flagrant flaw has always been his baroque superficiality, which becomes more apparent as he moves from loose anecdote into Amelie's picturesque adventure story. Rated R. At Denver's Esquire. -TD

The American Astronaut. (2001). How to describe this trippy grade-Z sci-fi spoof? If Andy Warhol ever made a movie with Ed Wood, this might have been the result. Don't misunderstand: I'm not being complimentary. Writer/director Cory McAbee stars as an astronaut who crosses orbits with some of the strangest, most unidentifiable flying and non-flying objects this side of Uranus. Singing cowboys, Venusian women, hard-up miners and The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's Breast ("It was round and soft," he reports) are only part of McAbee's constellation of loonies. Remember Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space? McAbee's spaced-out folly might be the lost outtakes from the first eight plans. At International Film Series. -TD

Bad Company. You'll find watching this hoary, phoned-in action flick that you don't care about much of anything or anyone in it. This should come as no surprise from a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, Joel Schumacher-directed profit-project. These two haven't even pretended to come up with a fresh idea in a decade. Anthony Hopkins stars as the straight white half of the buddy cop twosome. Chris Rock co-stars as the crazy black guy half. Actually, they're buddy CIA agents saving an A-bomb from black market thugs in a plot so hokey, so tediously juvenile, the USA network would pass on it. Rock can't act by the way, and delivers strident, stand up routines as lines. He seems to be in the wrong film - or night club. Hopkins literally walks through his scenes, muttering his dialogue, barely making eye contact with Rock or anyone else. Good for him. One simply wonders what gambling debt, or French villa made him do this movie. Unless you have sympathy to contribute to Hopkins' funds, catching up on your boredom at home is free.Rated R. At Crossroads, AMC Flatirons and Twin Peaks. - IV

The Big Lebowski. Two years ago, the fraternal filmmaking duo of Joel and Ethan Coen won raves, and a couple of Oscars, for their wacky black comedy Fargo. That was then, this is now, and The Big Lebowski is a big setback, and how. They've regrettably returned to their hip, surreal send-ups of old Hollywood crime movies in their wild story of a deadbeat bowler nicknamed "the Dude" (Jeff Bridges) who gets pinned into a fantastic plot involving blackmailers, nihilists and Republicans. He's shaken from his dope-filled daze when he's mistaken for an aging tycoon (David Huddleston) with a young wife who's mixed up with pornographers. Anything goes in the Coens' film-buff fantasy, including the Dude's Busby Berkeley-style hallucination. An indulgent spoof, The Big Lebowski isn't a straight gutter ball, but it's far from a strike. Rated R. At Boulder Theater. -TD

Cats and Dogs. Foregoing soulful characters for more technologically flashy talking animals, this film forgets Babe's simple lessons and overly animates pets a la Jar Jar Binks. In fact Phantom Menace similarities don't end there. Supposed technological superiority and commercial viability garnered an A list voice over cast including Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Tobey Maguire. Like Phantom Menace the film stagnates in awkward, computer over-production, stifling its actors, heart and momentum. Its premise is also unbalanced from the start. Cats and dogs wage an age-old secret backyard war for world control. Someone in development, however, is a dog person, because dogs are good and cats are evil. The cats' demonic conquests earn the PG rating. Whether this movie got produced for Republican retro-propaganda against Socks the Cat or Howard the Duck retribution, someone at the studio should have to take a drug test or go to the powertripper pound. Rated PG. At Arapahoe Village. - IV

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Don't get your Ya-Ya's out. Thelma and Louise screenwriter Callie Khouri tries her hand at directing, and she's all thumbs in a shambling adaptation of Rebecca Wells' best-selling novel. This forced female-bonding flick is stuffed with unpleasant, eccentric women who, in another day, would be simply dismissed as daft. Friends since childhood, The "Ya Ya's" are a group of four willful Louisiana women who've survived life, love and, ick, men together. When tempestuous Vivi (Ellen Burstyn) and her playwright daughter (Sandra Bullock) feud, the three other Ya-Ya's conspire to intervene. Khouri mangles the story, introducing characters and flashback scenes willy-nilly. Wells' Ya-Ya's come on less like New Age sisters than as old-fashioned shrews. With Maggie Smith and Ashley Judd. Rated PG-13. At AMC Flatirons, Colony Square, Crossroads Commons and Twin Peaks. -TD

Dogtown and Z-Boys. Director Stacy Peralta has managed a miracle--he's turned a documentary about skateboarding into an irresistable statement about American youth. This film, one of the best of the year, tracks the underground odyssey of the Zephyr skateboarding team, a rag-tag bunch of free spirits who almost singlehandedly transformed a fringe pastime into the sport it is today. Peralta himself was a "Z-boy," part of an elite group of former surfers who got their start on the beaches and streets of a seedy section of Los Angeles nicknamed Dogtown. Peralta's hip-hop cinematic style is a perfect accompaniment to the interviews and the vintage footage that recorded the Zephyr team's evolution into pop legend. Along with a slick selection of 1970s songs as background, Sean Penn adds a muted narration to this rollicking, rocking-and-rolling chronicle of American youth in the 1970s. At Boulder Theater. -TD

Enigma. Enigma marks the first feature from a production company started up by Mick Jagger. If Jagger's talents as rock-n-roller matched his filmmaking skills, he'd be bounced from the Rolling Stones and he'd be singing backup for Julio Iglesias instead. The World War II drama purports to tell the true story behind England's codebreaking efforts against the Germans. Oscar-winning playwright Tom Stoppard wrote the script, and the cast includes Kate Winslet and Jeremy Northam. Slipping in under the radar is Dougray Scott, an anonymous actor who will likely remain anonymous after this movie. Scott plays a brilliant codebreaker who suffers a breakdown following the break-up of his romance with a mysterious blonde (Saffron Burrows). Scott staggers through his role as if he's suffering from shell shock. After Hollywood's U-571 surfaced a few years ago, the Brits had reason to be upset. That film shamelessly gave credit to the Yanks for capturing the German "Enigma" cypher machine. But this British version does its own travesty to history, neglecting the facts in pursuit of a cryptic love story. Rated R. At Denver's Chez Artiste and Crossroads Commons. - TD

The Importance of Being Earnest. (1952). If you like Oscar Wilde then you'll probably love Anthony Asquith's diligent, but definitely stagey, screen adaptation of perhaps Wilde's wittiest work. Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans (as the imperious Lady Bracknell) lead a capable cast in Wilde's convoluted comedy-of-manners about the marriage schemes of two prim bachelors, one with a dubious family past. With Joan Greenwood and Michael Denison. At Denver's Esquire. -TD

Insomnia. In 2001, Englishman Christopher Nolan came out of nowhere with Memento, a mind-bending indie that was one of the year's sleeper hits. Flush with success, Nolan returns with an excessive Hollywood feature that flaunts a cast of three Oscar winners. In the remake of a 1997 Norwegian psychological thriller, Al Pacino and Hilary Swank play cops on the hunt in Alaska for the killer of a teenage girl. The wild card in the deal is Robin Williams, innocuously competent as a cold-blooded killer. Insomnia is a restless, expressionist hybrid of the art film and the star vehicle. You can sense how it's been pulled in separate directions. Your opinion of it may rest on how illuminating you take its main metaphor to be. Pacino is a man haunted by his dark past. An insomniac in the land of the midnight sun, he hides away his guilt from the light of truth. I've slept on Insomnia's symbolism, and I still think its an overworked cliche. Rated R. At Flatiron Crossing, Crossroads Commons, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. - IV

Kandahar. Director Mohsen Makhmalbalf's impeccably timed documentary fiction is the story of one woman's return to her native Afghanistan, a country at the time ruled by the totalitarian Islamic government of the Taliban. Makhmalbalf built the drama around the real-life dilemma of Canadian journalist Nelofer Pazira and her attempts to visit her homeland. Kandahar is neither documentary nor fiction, but a mysterious hybrid of both. The haunting main image is of Pazira clad in a burka, the notorious veiled gown that for years was the Afghan woman's only allowable public dress. It's said that the devil is in the details. From everything we've seen and heard of the Taliban's reign of terror, we must also say that he found a welcome home in Afghanistan. Unrated. At International Film Series. -TD

Manhandled (1924). In one of her seven star vehicles directed by Allan Dwan, silent diva Gloria Swanson plays a lowly New York City shopgirl who decides to sample high society by impersonating a Russian heiress. Piano accompaniment by Hank Troy. At Chautauqua. -TD

Monsoon Wedding. If Monsoon Wedding were a meal, it would be curry chicken, hearty tandouri bread and rice pudding, washed down by spicy chai tea. Director Mira Nair's tribute to Indian family life is both loving and bittersweet. What it lacks in finesse, it makes up for in earthy exuberance. The occasion is the imminent marriage of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and Hemant (Parvin Dabas), both children of affluent, Westernized parents. With four days until the big event, the father (Neseeruddin Shah) is showing the stress. Another soggy complication lies with the bride, who's still involved with her married lover. Though the story meanders like a slithering cobra, one can't complain about Nair's flair in capturing India's rich cultural traditions and rites. All of the characters go back and forth between English and Hindi, testifying to modern India's unique, sometimes schizoid, wedding of East and West. Rated R. At Denver's Chez Artiste, Crossroads Commons and Nederland Backdoor Theater. -TD

My Big Fat Greek Wedding. When Mrs. Tom Hanks (a.k.a. actress Rita Wilson) saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding on Broadway and asked hubby to produce a pet film version, Hanks made one great decision and one bad one. Hanks wisely asked Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of the hit Broadway play, to write the screenplay and star in the film version instead of the Mrs. Unfortunately, Hanks chose to indulge his old "Bosom Buddies" T.V. show director, Joel Zwick, as director. As a result this romantic comedy, about a sheltered Greek woman who breaks strict family tradition to marry a W.A.S.P. man, is a mixed bag. On one hand Vardalos is hilarious, commanding and truly touching as her beleagured Toula Portakalos. Vardalos' unconventional looks, intelligence and winning chemistry with leading man John Corbett make a refreshing Julia-Roberts departure for the screwball-comedy bride. On the other hand, Zwick's sappy sit-com style slaps Vardalos' labor of love into one laborious convention and cutesy frame after another. Over all, the film ends up breaking even. Wedding is a funny, sweet, decent little piece of Baklava, light and easily consumed. You just get the feeling a robust, outrageous wedding feast should have taken place here. Rated PG. At Crossroads Commons. -IV

Petulia (1968). Director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) took his flashy but dramatically slender pop stylings to America for a melancholy account of a love affair between the kooky Petulia (Julie Christie) and a divorced San Francisco doctor (George C. Scott). At Boulder Public Library.

Naropa Summer Writing Program. A program of short avant-garde pieces including Pull My Daisy (1958) and Open Fire (1963). At Boulder Public Library.

Scotland, PA. A fast-food Americanized version of Macbeth that's more foul than fair. At a dumpy burger joint in the 1970s, "Mac," (James LeGros) a short-order cook, schemes with his frisky wife (Maura Tierney) to kill the owner so they can McDonaldize the place and install a drive-up window. Mac's prodded into murder by three hippies (not witches), and he's visited by a vegetarian detective named McDuff (Christopher Walken). The Wacky Walken is best reason to see this refried spoof of 1970s trash culture, but even he can't turn it into a Happy Meal. Rated R. At International Film Series. -TD

Sleeper (1973). Before his angst and anhedonia set in permanently, Woody Allen made this rambling slapstick satire set in a bleak totalitarian future "worse than California." In a coma for 200 years, Allen's Miles Monroe awakens and finds himself a hunted alien in a world of domestic robots, giant vegetables and home orgasmatrons. Diane Keaton plays his brainwashed employer, and later, Stanley Kowalski. (The film was primarily shot in Colorado, including a few scenes in Boulder.) At Boulder Outdoor Cinema. --T.D. At Boulder Outdoor Cinema. -TD

Spider-Man. The first 2002 summer blockbuster has crawled into theaters. So who are you gonna call? I vote for the exterminator. Director Sam Raimi and star Tobey Maguire have transformed the comic-book superhero into a wall-climbing, web-slinging super zero. I don't know what specific audience the filmmakers were aiming for, but they missed their mark. Spider-Man is too violent for younger kids, too hokey for older ones. Especially deadly are the lame computer-generated special effects. Another venomous problem has to do with Raimi's decision to set this supposed diversion in contemporary New York City, with last September's terrorist attacks still fresh in our memories. In everyday life, Spider-Man is Peter Parker (Maguire), a meek teenager goes from geek to freak when he's bitten by a genetically altered spider. He morphs into a brawny guy who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Spider-Man's nemesis is the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), a cackling fiend who rides around blowing up things on a flying skateboard armed with machine guns. With Kirsten Dunst. Rated PG-13. At FlatIron Crossing, Basemar Twin, Colony Square, Nederland Backdoor Theatre and Twin Peaks. -TD

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Don't expect chatty horses charging through Dreamworks' animated Western. Favoring equine dialogue of neighs and whinnies, it just says nay to over-anthropomorphism. Borrowing from Black Beauty, this is a somber fable told from the perspective of its hero, a wild mustang of the old West. With the country-folk songs by Bryan Adams, you could say this is real horse opera. Spirit runs wild until the fateful day when he's lassoed by cowboys and sold to the U.S. Cavalry. Children should get a kick out of Spirit's horseplay, even if some of them won't understand the downbeat tale of his captivity. The story's value may lie in showing kids that there are other ways to see the world besides from the human view. Rated G. At Flatiron Crossing, Arapahoe Village, Colony Square and Twin Peaks. -TD

Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones. "It's got to be better than Episode I." That's what I told myself as I went to see Attack of the Clones. Holy Han Solo. Was I ever wrong?! How do you make a boring, silly sci-fi sequel prequel? Let me count the ways: 1) Start with predetermined heroes and villains whom the audience knows must turn out a certain way; 2) Allow the production to be atacked and overrun by computerized visual effects; 3) Hire a cast of mannequins, beginning with Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker; 4) Write dopey dialogue, such as Yoda's fractured syntax; 5) When all else fails, throw in a nebulous plot that's as clear as R2D2 speaking underwater. Will any of the above have any effect on on Episode II's ability to rack up galactic numbers at the box-office? I doubt it. Star Wars fans are slavishly obedient to Lucas, whatever bone he throws them. If Lucas served up funny-tasting Kool-Aid in a cup, Star Wars cultists would still line up around the block. But it's way past time for fans to face the facts and move on. George Lucas wouldn't know what good moviemaking was if it was digitally downloaded into his head. Episode II lands in theaters full of THX sound and digitized fury, but signifying nothing. With Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. Rated PG. At FlatIron Crossing, Colony Square, United Artists Village and Twin Peaks. -TD

The Sum of All Fears. It may be the only movie ever in which a catastrophic detonation of a nuclear bomb in the U.S. is not treated as the climax. That alone demonstrates why this timely, exciting but exploitative thriller is ultimately a dud. Sum marks the cinematic return of Tom Clancy's CIA superagent Jack Ryan, with Ben Affleck now playing Ryan as a junior CIA analyst. With all the world's potential evildoers to choose from, the filmmakers pick on a bunch of Austrian neo-Nazis who look more like psychoanalysts than fascists. Despite this basic flaw, the film almost succeeds as an old-fashioned spy thriller, supercharged with contemporary relevance. Along with Phil Alden Robinson's efficient direction is another magnetic performance by Morgan Freeman. But when this movie goes wrong, it goes way wrong. By that I mean the filmmakers' decision to use the explosion of an A-bomb in the U.S. as a mere plot point. Sum of All Fears adds up to an explosive thriller with imagery that will be hard to shake. Yet if paunchy Nazis were America's worst nightmare, we'd all be sleeping like babies. With James Cromwell. Rated PG-13. At Twin Peaks, FlatIron Crossing, Arapahoe Village and Colony Square. -TD

Undercover Brother. See review. With Denise Richards. Rated PG-13. At Flatiron Crossing and Crossroads Commons. -TD