There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one. The director, an Italian documentarian whose observational films demonstrate a formal rigor that often brings them close to experimental cinema and installation work, has trained his…
Writer/director Zach Clark is seemingly obsessed with goody-goody women who hide a darker side. In his breakout indie hit White Reindeer, a suburban real estate agent copes with her fiancé’s death with compulsive shopping, stripper friends and raunchy sex parties; in Modern Love Is Automatic, a woman leads a secret…
Right now, Disney XD is probably best known for its increasingly relevant Star Wars Rebels series, as well as for being the only cable channel with an emoticon in its name — at least until the inevitable debut of the Trump 🙁 Channel. Disney XD is also on probation with…
Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive consists of a pair of mid-sized rooms and one very small one, so the space can get cramped when each area is assigned to a separate exhibit. The crowded feel is exacerbated when the styles of the art in the various exhibits don’t jibe…
The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District has been part of my life for almost all of it. I was born in Colorado in 1980; voters in the six-country metro area approved the SCFD tax — one penny on every ten dollars — in 1988. Denver is a better city for…
Over the years, the red carpet at the Denver Film Festival has been graced by plenty of terrific cinematic artists but relatively few mega-stars. So why was the crowd hugging the rug prior to last night’s kickoff of the fest’s 39th edition roughly five times the usual size? Two words:…
November is upon us and a bountiful joke harvest awaits. In addition to fine showings from our city’s theaters and comedy clubs that have imported the finest and funniest from across the country to stock our larders with laughs, our locally sourced talents are flourishing. Some fans may notice the…
#51: Phaedra High Phaedra High — Denver entrepreneur, event-thrower, maker and advocate for natural hair and beauty care — calls herself a “nerd with her head in the clouds,” but that doesn’t mean she’s not getting things done. A primary hand in producing the Denver Natural Hair Care Expo for…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights a selection for November 3: One Week and a Day…
The wooden troll figures that Thomas Dam began carving and selling in the ‘50s had a great deal of folklore behind them but no cast of fixed characters. Though the Trolls have since been in TV specials, video games and a short-lived series, none of those have established what we…
The Handmaiden, Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Gothic lesbian tale of romance, revenge and (light) bondage, is the kind of electrifying indulgence only he can make. The film is a loose adaptation of Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’ 2002 thriller Fingersmith, about a female pickpocket who poses as a maid for a…
When Sarah Waters published her gothic lesbian suspense novel Fingersmith in early 2002, the U.S. was beginning a relatively speedy transformation on the LGBT front, building to today’s legalized same-sex marriage and a presidential candidate’s full-throated support for expanded LGBT rights. Buoyed by that shift, Waters’ story of clandestine female lovers…
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a film at war with itself. Which makes perfect sense, because it’s about a man at war with himself, and I’m pretty sure it was also made by a man at war with himself. The true-life story of Desmond Doss — a Seventh Day Adventist…
“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…
It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…
In the hierarchy of exhibits, the retrospective solo ranks at the top of the heap, as it allows viewers to follow an artist’s aesthetic life through the course of a career. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is currently hosting just such a show, Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves, organized…
The Alamo Drafthouse is putting a spin on its popular Baby Day shows by introducing Alamo for All, screenings that not only accommodate young families, but families and guests with special needs who are not able to appreciate a typical movie presentation. Not that any movie screenings here are typical…
At what point do we stop looking at a show like Black Mirror as a sign of things to come and start acknowledging it as a reflection of where we already are? All the Terminators and 2001s in the world couldn’t prevent us from lusting after self-driving cars, asking Siri…
When she was four years old, my friend’s daughter Joy was probing one of the most profound mysteries of the universe. A passionate pursuer of justice and mercy even at that young age, she was sitting on the pot and interrogating her mother about the world. Why, given a caring…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights the opening-night feature, La La Land, and offers a preview…
A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…
