Love is weird. Most anyone over the age of, say, sixteen or so has at least one story of an ill-fated romance based on the old adage of “opposites attract.” Worse, it’s usually more “whatever will cause us the most confusion, chaos and, most likely, pain attracts.” That’s not to…
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…
Here’s a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is top-to-bottom depraved: “Then why are our high-school witches, vampires and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That glitter-pored Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing…
Life goes inexorably, chillingly, on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all of these pitiable souls, subjected…
Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking if you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action — and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Three local film festivals — the Boulder International Film Festival, the Festivus Film Festival and Women + Film — will light up Denver-area screens over the latter half of February and the early part of March, providing plenty of viewing opportunities for movie buffs. The mission of the Boulder International…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
If Sundance signals the annual launch of American indie cinema’s new product line, the 63-year-old Berlin Film Festival (February 7-17) offers the year’s first major look at what the rest of the world has to offer. In addition to the nineteen-film official competition — this year presided over by jury…
Stepping into its third year, the Women + Film Voices Festival is gearing up for another phenomenal run this March. As a precursor to the week of films written by, directed by, produced by and starring women, the Sie FilmCenter will host a special one-night only screening of The Invisible…
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…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
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…
