Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…
Denver has scored its first World Football Film Festival just in time for the World Cup, which starts June 12. Sponsored by Denver Film Society, America Scores Denver, Soccer Electric and Three Lions Pub, the inaugural festival will run June 5 through June 8 at the Sie FilmCenter. See also:…
Whether you’re looking for a dip into cinema studies, a killer sports doc or a trashy romantic comedy, Denver’s big screens have you covered this month. Bike to the Blake Street Tavern for 40-Year-Old Virgin, immerse yourself in the glory of five of Hitchcock’s greatest films and kick your way…
The Western genre isn’t entirely comprised of spaghetti or John Wayne talking out the side of his mouth: From its earliest days, filmmakers were putting a comic spin on stories set on the dusty trail, with the genre hitting its apex between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s. We’ve gathered…
We’re still adjusting to Seth MacFarlane as a big-screen star. Not just because his breakneck absurdist humor often demands that viewers pause and rewind, but because the man himself looks like a hand-inked cartoon, with his black, pupil-less eyes and an alabaster baby face that appears to reflect light like…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsized-to-large city, in 1962, 1982 or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
The triptych of masculinities at the core of director Jim Mickle’s Sundance hit Cold in July (he co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Damici) pulls double duty; it leads the viewer down a nerve-racking rabbit hole of violence, gore and clever throwaway wisecracks while anchoring the film’s sly musing on what…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-sized piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…
Kirk Hanna was a cattle rancher, a conservationist and a Colorado legend before his untimely death at age 43. His pursuit of a utopian vision for the ranching way of life, and his impact on open-space preservation and resource management, are just part of the story told in Hanna Ranch,…
Some things are just too good to be true, like a Dune film starring Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and David Carradine, directed by cult-film legend Alejandro Jodorowsky, with effects and art by Mœbius, H.R. Giger and Dan O’Bannon. Such a thing is clearly too awesome to exist, but…
Amy Metier. The William Havu Gallery is currently showing Amy Metier: Preconceived Notions, a marvelous solo that’s filled with modernist-derived abstractions. The show — Metier’s first in-town solo in two years — fills the gallery’s entire main level, not only with her signature paintings, but also with prints featuring experimental…
Surely, at some point, they thought of casting Michael Cera. Richard Ayoade’s often marvelous The Double, an existential jest set in a bureaucratic dystopia so familiar and lightly comic it may as well be Kafka Fantasy Camp, stars Jesse Eisenberg, the Oscar winner and future Lex Luthor, as a beleaguered…
When it comes to social or political movements, Americans tend to favor hero narratives that focus on or elevate individuals. And if the tale ends in tragedy, we want there to be some sort of blaze-of-glory defiance in play. As outlined in the documentary Hanna Ranch (see Night & Day…
It’s been a few days since I saw David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, screening here in competition, and I’m still not completely sure what I think of this sometimes-smart, sometimes-arch ultra-black comedy about shallow Hollywood types. But one thing’s for sure: Julianne Moore is a knockout in it. Moore…
America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Lawrence, truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s managed to graciously lose an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swan above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster…
#492425863 / gettyimages.com Marion Cotillard, the star of the Dardenne Brothers’ competition film Two Days, One Night, showed up for the photo call on Tuesday in a mini-dress encrusted with a riot of buttons, a whimsical and rather adorable choice for an actress who, on-screen just a few minutes earlier,…
A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…
Stephanie Zacharek has been reporting online from the Cannes Film Festival. For much more, including a couple daft cartoons she drew, visit westword.com/movies/. Foxcatcher Even if Steve Carell’s performance in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher — a terrific one — ends up being the most lauded in the film, what Channing Tatum…
James McAvoy knows not to trust the British tabloids. While flogging his grotty drama Filth, based on the Irvine Welsh novel about a coke-addicted, double-crossing cop, they breathlessly reported that the Scottish actor had dived so deep into method acting that he’d convinced a German hooker to punch him in…
Some films are just meant to be seen on the big screen, but apart from a handful of cult classics and genre favorites, opportunities to do so can be few and far between. Denver’s Landmark Theatre chain is looking to change that with “A Film for All Seasons,” a 24-week…
It was Jason Tugman’s first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams. A former circus fire-eater, he’d taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he…
