Though its sister theater, the Mayan, seems to grab all the attention as an historical treasure, Landmark’s Esquire Theatre is actually a little bit older — though you wouldn’t know it from its moderne facade. But while the Mayan, which opened in 1930, survives — with tweaks — as the…
A trio of filmmakers from Carbondale won three of the four festival awards at the Chamonix Adventure Festival over the weekend in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France: Tyler Stableford won the Jury Prize for Shattered, his portrait of alpinist Steve House (see it in full after the jump); Skip Armstrong and Forge Motion…
“I have always been against this idea of the ‘clash of cultures,'” Marjane Satrapi says. “It’s the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve ever heard.” That’s apparent from her films and graphic novels, which bridge worlds. Born in Iran, Satrapi emigrated to Europe with her family when she was a teenager…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
It might be true that we hurt the ones we love the most, but André Téchiné’s epic neo-family drama depicts offenses—attempted murder, mid-funeral beat downs, sex videos for Daddy—that no relation should have to countenance. Alain Resnais mainstay André Dussollier plays Francis, a best-selling mystery writer who travels to Venice…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, and to top the Hollywood A-list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in…
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors, and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year old in Nowheresville whose…
David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…
At tonight’s installment of the Denver Film Society’s Women + Film series, PeaceJam’s Dawn Engle will be the woman, and The Mayan Renaissance will be the film. This fastidious and lovely history of Mayan civilization and culture fast-forwards into the present, as it is seen by Nobel laureate (and PeaceJam…
Blockbuster, now a subsidy of Dish Network, yesterday officially opened its international headquarters in Colorado — specifically, at the Meridian International Office Park in Douglas County. The move comes with the possibility of $2.5 million in Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits from the Colorado Economic Development Commission, since Blockbuster promises…
Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man such a gift. In telling the tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American balladeer from Detroit who cut a…
It’s a hard world to be different in,” says Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) to her Pinterest/vision-board child Timothy (CJ Adams) while trying to explain why he must cover up the leaves that sprout on his legs. “Lots of people hate anything that’s different.” That hammer-to-nail, nutshelled life lesson is one…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
The Colorado Independent Women in Film program, an annual three-day event at the Bug Theatre that showcases the work of women in the Colorado film industry, opens tomorrow. Packed, a short documentary that follows evacuees of Boulder’s Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010 and describes the possessions they collected on their…
Last weekend, more than fifty teams of local filmmakers wrote, shot and edited entire film in 48 hours. Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the film they made had to be in a genre selected at random, and incorporate a line of dialogue and prop that…
This deft, atmospheric Errol Morris-style tour through the phenomenon that is “serial imposter” Frédéric Bourdin homes in on one brief episode from the man’s berserk career: the period in 1997 when the 23-year-old Frenchman convinced a Texas family that he was their disappeared teenage son. This is already well-trod territory,…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books: They’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series up…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less successful 1996 campaign…
In mid-August, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far landed on the red planet. The Curiosity Rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of life, study its climate and geology, and collect data that might help future manned missions. To get in the spirit, we’ve combed…
For many, especially black people who see in her a mockery of our own grandmothers, Tyler Perry’s Madea is little more than a mammy — an insult to the matriarchal community figure that Perry claims to celebrate. And unforgivably, when compared to Flip Wilson’s Geraldine or even Martin Lawrence’s Big…
