If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog whistle for Academy voters…
Forbidden fruit has never seemed as poisonous as it does in Thanks for Sharing, a remarkably sensitive and surprisingly romantic ensemble drama about sex addiction. A winsome mix of funny, harrowing and smart, it is most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior — and who refuse…
If the movies have taught us anything, it’s this: Don’t expect an easy time of hanging on to satchels of cash you find in the woods. David M. Rosenthal’s A Single Shot — a sturdy, nasty rural noir based on Matthew F. Jones’s novel of the same name — is…
A decade of continuity for the Denver Film Society ended with the departure of programming manager Keith Garcia last month. Denver film fans who came to trust Garcia’s vision needn’t worry, though — the show will go on, and the newest addition to the DFS family is already on the…
The lights and the camera, the big stars and the director’s chair — these are the icons we associate with filmmaking. But the magic on the silver screen wouldn’t happen without such key players as casting directors and producers. Local filmmakers and fans can learn about the people behind the…
Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner premieres Valhalla tonight in Denver at the Paramount Theatre as the local ski porn season kicks into full swing. The follow-up to Solitude, Waggoner’s grim, gritty, and award-winning meditation on death and skiing in South America, is the opposite of all of that. See also: Sniagrab…
Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…
Alicia Scherson’s enthralling Il Futuro asks the question no one wants to hear: How would you see the world after a personal tragedy? When her parents are killed in a car accident, teenage Bianca (Manuela Martelli) is forced to face this existential quandary, not only with regard to her own…
If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen, of course, could be…
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7′ 3″ actor who played Chewbacca…
There’s something about celluloid that captures things no other medium can, explains Christopher May. So when he started noticing film festivals getting rid of their 16 mm projection, he decided to found the International Experimental Cinema Exposition, aka TIE. Along with experimental filmmaking icon Stan Brakhage, May started TIE in…
Keith Garcia, creative manager for the Alamo Drafthouse, thinks that Mean Girls is the perfect, quotable high-school movie — hence the Mean Girls Quote-Along event taking place Friday, September 13, and Sunday, September 15. “Tina Fey did such an amazing job of writing that screenplay that there are so many…
What does Kylie Ireland — the star of Deep Anal Abyss 3 and Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody — have in common with John August, who shares screenwriting credits for Big Fish, Corpse Bride and Charlies’ Angels? How about with Monica Staggs, who served as a stunt double for…
Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…
There’s something unsettling about Anne Fontaine’s Adore, and, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with the two middle-aged women who fall in love with each other’s teenage sons in the film. The cougars in question are Lil and Roz, best friends since childhood played with notable earnestness by Naomi Watts…
Here’s a humble wig-out, a curio that could endure beyond its creators’ more demonstrably successful works — and that for decades will certainly confound audiences who think they’re streaming/torrenting/eye-jacking some broad Paul Rudd comedy they had forgotten about. Prince Avalanche director David Gordon Green gives star Rudd more chances to…
Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition and resonance. Easily one of the best…
All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…
As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn’t award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award the second-place prize, the Silver Lion, to six films, among them I Vitelloni and Ugetsu. How did I know this? To celebrate the festival’s 70th edition,…
It’s 8:20 and you’re in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you’re watching a spurned wife cut off her teenage son’s penis–and eat it–as retribution for her husband’s infidelity. Ah, Tuesday. But wow, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius is some movie! If you have…
