On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek both praise Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), saying the director exhibits a “lovely human touch” with film, which is set in space, and that it’s “so different than anything else he’s…
Fanboys (and girls!), start your engines — Joss Whedon is back on TV, and this time he brought the Marvel Universe with him. Hot off the massive success of The Avengers, Whedon has taken the helm of its spinoff series, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. The show launches him once more into…
Written, produced, directed, and edited by Rena Riffel, who also reprises her role as Penny from the original Showgirls, Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven has been available on VOD for at least a year, but is now being released on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing, thus conferring onto it the…
Al Wynne. As many know, the Black Forest home and studio shared for more than sixty years by the late Al Wynne and his widow, Lou Wynne, was utterly destroyed by fire this summer. The conflagration took some 400 works by Al in the form of watercolors and drawings, constituting…
James Gandolfini’s charisma wasn’t something turned on at will, but rather a vibe that radiated from deep within: It’s in the timbre of his voice, his rolling carriage, the way he’s always just one flirtatious millisecond behind the beat. Part of what Gandolfini does in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said is…
To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He’s already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out-Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” — like…
It was 1976, a year when all the groovy girls were traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys had Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year’s Formula One World Championship. (The embroidered badge on…
Mild spoilers up to The Bridge’s ninth episode below. Artisanal murders are all the rage these days. On Showtime’s Dexter, NBC’s Hannibal and Fox’s The Following, small-batch, labor-intensive, sold-with-a-story slaughters have become TV’s equivalent of the Cronut. Handsome, intelligent and mannered as court eunuchs, serial killers have become the new…
When filmmaker Ethan Knightchilde was growing up on the East Coast, a cheesy ghost story sparked an interest in ghost towns that ultimately led him to create the monumental documentary Ghosts of the West, which will have its Denver debut at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 26, at the Esquire Theatre…
Sender Films had the story of the year fall into its lap through pure chance. The Boulder-based climbing filmmakers had sent a cameraman to follow the mountain-scaling superteam of Ueli Steck and Simone Moro as they attempted to climb a new route across Everest and its neighboring peak, Lhotse, when…
The eighth annual Reel Rock tour, the traveling climbing film show that has become the gold standard in its field over the past decade, launches in Boulder tonight at the Chautauqua Auditorium. On the menu are four new flicks from Sender Films and Big UP productions, including the controversial and…
Colorado native Courtney Mizel is a lot of things — including the founding director of The Cell (The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab) in Denver, a small business consultant and former small business owner…and a movie producer. Now based out of Los Angeles, Mizel still does quite a bit of work…
Lines and Grids. This show, organized by Marks Aardsma, who serves not only as curator, but as participating artist as well, is the fourth in a series of exhibits she’s put together called “Art of the Real.” Aardsma is interested in the nature of painting and has invited eight others…
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…
