To watch Melissa McCarthy as lovable chef Sookie St. James on seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls was to see an actress perfect the art of playing a sidekick. As the best friend of the show’s protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), McCarthy dutifully provided comic relief and a shoulder on…
“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always worked with writers whose voices are so specific that there really isn’t any way to recalibrate things without them being intimately involved,” says Steven Soderbergh as he swivels in a chair in the happily cluttered Flatiron District loft space that doubles as his…
As ubiquitous as the bagel, the traditional Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” is a piece of music that seamlessly crosses cultures. But where did it come from? Hava Nagila, the movie, will provide the answers when the documentary opens the 17th Annual Denver Jewish Film Festival this Wednesday, February 6…
One of the key goals of the Denver Jewish Film Festival is to get people outside of the Jewish faith engaged. “For us, getting the word out to the Jewish community is easy; getting the word out to the larger community is more challenging,” says Roberta Bloom, director of the…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
From its first moments, the wish-fulfillment political-campaign comedy Knife Fight serves as an accidental demonstration of the value of staying on message. After introducing us to Rob Lowe as ace political fixer Paul and Jamie Chung as an assistant made queasy by the pragmatic cynicism her job demands, the film…
Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys and the identical humiliations visited upon Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems that Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into…
There’s scant dialogue but plenty of eloquent storytelling in the five animated short films up for a 2013 Oscar. Save for a five-minute Simpsons segment (“Maggie Simpson in ‘The Longest Daycare'”), this year’s nominees are a mute and expressionistic bunch. With evocative elegance, they convey both plot and emotion through…
Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady…
“It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, dean of the American action movie, speaking to me from Los Angeles. “Action films are, by their very nature, more expensive than what are sometimes called, in the independent world, ‘relationship films.’ But I despise these categories. I’ve never made…
Dave Grohl is a busy guy. The Foo Fighters frontman is a member of multiple supergroups, played alongside Paul McCartney at the 12/12/12 Sandy Relief Concert, will be the keynote speaker at South by Southwest this March, and just made his directing debut with Sound City, a documentary tracing the…
As the University of Colorado at Boulder’s International Film Series kicks off its spring series tonight, you might notice a slight shift in the force. Longtime IFS director Pablo Kjolseth, one of the area’s last holdouts in the 35mm-or-digital debate over quality of film experience, is considering, and maybe more…
erpbUpstream ColorBold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less…
Dennis Quaid gets around. Since the late ’70s, he’s appeared in more than seventy films and television shows, playing everything from a deep-space fighter pilot to an dragon-slaying warrior, and always with a certain swaggering charm. This Friday and Saturday at the Sie FilmCenter, Mile High Sci-Fi is tackling one…
Colorado Art Survey VIII. Every year, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant organizes a show in which new acquisitions are combined with pieces already in the collection to illustrate the art history of the state. Grant lays out the somewhat sequential stylistic categories in roughly chronological order. The date range for…
A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…
There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d’Or. Amour, Haneke’s much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed…
Being a lucky guy, I’ve only been kicked in the balls once. How did it rate on the comedy scale? Well, it was funnier than a monologue by Chelsea Handler, but not quite as hilarious as my last screening for colorectal cancer. Yet despite the fact that this act hurts…
In George A. Romero’s deeply silly 1993 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half, Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a writer whose highbrow pretensions don’t pay the bills. When Thad needs to make a quick buck, then, he seals himself into his study and grinds out a nihilistic thriller to…
David KrutaStacie Passon’s Concussion is a happy surprise.Sometimes, one film in a festival lineup can help to reveal another in sharper relief. To wit, one of the loveliest entries in Sundance 2013’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, James Ponsoldt’s deeply felt coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now, looked even better after the premiere…
Many Denver theater-goers remember Jacqueline Antaramian from her roles with the Denver Center Theatre Company. During her ten years there, she starred in Mark Harelik’s The Immigrant, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, among others, and she was a memorable Masha in Chekhov’s Three…
Rachel MorrisonMichael B. Jordan (The Wire), who’s fully up to the challenge, in Fruitvale.You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in…
