Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Paradise Now, a new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, looks at the lives of two young suicide bombers. Howie Movshovitz of Colorado Public Radioreports.