State lawmakers are pondering a bipartisan proposal today that would help fund the track maintenance and upgrades that Amtrak says it needs to keep running its Southwest Chief route through southern Colorado. The railroad wants approximately $40 million a piece from Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico over the next decade…
It can be overwhelming to navigate the wide variety of films and panels that run February 13 through 16 at the tenth annual Boulder International Film Festival. Luckily you can’t go wrong, says director and co-founder Kathy Beeck. The common thread is good storytelling. From the free Youth Pavilion to…
Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us, and love is in the air. Everywhere you look, people are planning fancy dates or at least renting their favorite romantic movies for a night of couch-snuggling with their beloved. Contrary to the stereotypes, geeks are no different. Well, maybe a little different –…
Does Bob Costas have pink eye? Yikes. #welcometoSochi pic.twitter.com/oPE7iTpkdb— Dan Ukrainetz (@Dan_Uk1) February 8, 2014 The lead-up to Sochi was filled with dire signs that Putin’s games were doomed. The toilets are weird! There’s no Chobani! They’re butchering thousands of dogs! My honey packet had a bee in it! And…
Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be complete without at least one showing of Casablanca, one of the greatest love stories of all time. But Bogart and Bergman will meet up several times over the next week on screens across the city, at evenings featuring everything from the movie and a martini to…
Marika Bournaki was a vivacious piano player at five and an old pro at twelve when documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart began following the Montreal-born musician around with a camera. For eight years, Hart captured every part of Bournaki’s life, as she balanced studying at Juilliard and traveling the globe…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from thirteen nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996, when they housed the server for their new…
Now that people are living so much longer, our self-invention can seemingly go on forever. The heroine of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s exuberant semi-comedy Gloria is right in the middle of the fifty-something version of that in-betweenness. We join her story already in progress, but get the idea pretty quickly:…
Cross Currents. This ambitious show, put together by CVA creative director Cecily Cullen, showcases contemporary art by Native Americans from across the country. It is a followup to Currents, a show Cullen did at the old LoDo CVA in 2009 that was on the same theme and was equally intelligent…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
In the years before her death in 1999, Altina Schinasi Miranda was best-known for her sculptures and paintings. But the daughter of a poor Turkish immigrant-turned-tobacco-tycoon was more than just an artist — she was an Oscar-winning filmmaker, an activist and the inventor of the Harlequin glasses frames, which became…
Quick, somebody check Jason Reitman’s house to see if the real man has been turned into dust by a body snatcher. Though his name’s on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking and Young Adult would direct a stilted romance…
Baltimore’s 12 O’Clock Boys are a dirt-bike crew who literally believe in “ride or die.” If it weren’t for their Sundays in the streets causing havoc for the cops, boredom and stress would get them in worse trouble. And from what we see in Lotfy Nathan’s documentary, we believe it…
Anyone can catch American Hustle or Dallas Buyers Club on the big screen, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities to see the short films that have been nominated for the 86th Academy Awards, which will air on March 2. So film buffs may want to check out the Oscar…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
A favorite pastime of critics and serious film-goers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden age of…
Early this month, we learned that Guy Fieri was casting for the second season of his new TV show, and we realized we forgot something: Guy has a new TV show! Guy has a new TV show much of the time, but it’s not like us to simply ignore a…
Citizen Kane will screen in 35-millimeter print on the big screen at the Sie Film Center tomorrow in conjunction with a discussion of Cinematic States: Stories We Tell, the American Dreamlife, and How to Understand Everything, a book by Northern Irish author and film critic Gareth Higgins, who explores American…
Amidst the blizzard of film-lovers blanketing Park City, Utah for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Ernie Quiroz, the Denver Film Society’s programming manager, watched sixteen movies in just three days, an enviable sprint for most seasoned couch-potatoes. More enviable, he did it for work. Quiroz returned to Denver Monday after…
When Lamberto Bava’s splatter classic Demons screens this Saturday, January 25 at the Alamo Drafthouse, it isn’t just a rare chance to see this obscure gem on the big screen. The film also marks the debut of Channel Z, Keith Garcia’s new cult-film series that picks up where his excellent…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
