Howie Movshovitz
Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages.
In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
He has been reviewing films on public radio since 1976 (first review: Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians). Along the way he spent nine years as the film critic of The Denver Post, and has been contributing features on film subjects to NPR since 1987.
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The new film from British director Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner, takes up an historical figure: iconic British painter JMW Turner. But it also incorporates another theme of Leigh's: the human story of the working person. Painting was Turner's job and he was as down to earth as a factory worker.
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Filmmakers Alex and Andrew Smith knew American Indian writer James Welch — he was a family friend. But as non-Native Americans, they had concerns about adapting his iconic novel, Winter in the Blood. -
The filmmaker fell in love with Polish cinema in college, and the images have stayed with him ever since. "I close my eyes, I see them," he says. "They're very vivid, expressive, immediate." Scorsese's festival of 21 handpicked movies will travel to 30 American cities. -
Shirley Clarke's 1967 film Portrait of Jason has returned to theaters after a meticulous restoration. As a historian and a documentarian tell reporter Howie Movshovitz, it's as remarkable in many ways today as it ever was. -
Already the poster child for his country's so-called New Wave of filmmakers, the director takes another realistic dive into the post-Communist Eastern Bloc with Beyond the Hills. Though he hesitates to call it a straight metaphor, the symbolism of the film is uncanny. -
Sydney Pollack died Monday of cancer at his home in Los Angeles. He was best known for directing The Way We Were, Out of Africa, Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor, among many other movies. But he began his career as an actor.
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This year's European Film Award for best movie was won by an unknown Austrian, who beat out established directors like Pedro Almodovar and Ken Loach. The Lives of Others is set in the former East Germany. It's about a Stasi agent who has a change of heart about his country's repressive regime — in part because of a beautiful piece of music.
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The 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, made by the Maysles brothers, is being re-issued on DVD with an extra hour of footage. The controversial film peers into the scattered and reclusive lives of two of Jackie Onassis' cousins. The women lived in a decrepit East Hampton mansion.
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The latest movie from the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, L'Enfant, is heading to U.S. shores. It won the top prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Like the brothers' previous work, it was shot in their hometown, a former industrial powerhouse that has fallen on hard times.
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Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were anthropologists who followed ancient cultures with their cameras. Their dramatic experiences as documentary filmmakers informed their mythical, fictional masterpiece about a lost world and its secret creature, King Kong.
