“I’ll just tell you straight out: Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin admits. This is really something coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious—I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away from her…
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn’t mean Total Recall isn’t ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produced by the…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a fifteen-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as “the Voice.” Houston’s pipes…
One of the most interesting things about Cosmopolis, writer/director David Cronenberg’s extraordinary adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel by the same name, is that it’s based on the first script Cronenberg has both written and shot since 1999’s eXistenZ. Additionally, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis marks the first time he has adapted…
There is no Denver Memorial Hospital. But if there were, we’d bet it wouldn’t be in Vancouver. Sadly, that’s where the upcoming CW television series Emily Owens, M.D., set at the fictional Denver Memorial Hospital, is being filmed. The show, which stars actress Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter) as a…
Colorado has become the Hollywood of the adventure-film business, and the local ski-porn premiere season will be in full swing by this time next month. But the Colorado-based crews at Matchstick Productions (MSP), Level 1 Productions and Stept Productions have already released tantalizing teasers for their 2012 films. Here’s a…
This Sunday, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far will land 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. The Denver Museum of Nature and…
Vividly bringing to life the question of whether self-denial is a social responsibility that Don DeLillo poses in Cosmopolis, Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, tracks the post-crash lifestyle of rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude. The titular royal is Jackie Siegel,…
It’s one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring emotional hangups, is discovered as a swan by a clearly out-of-his-league girl who loves him just the way he is. Buffalo ’66 (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love…
Joachim Trier has proven to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The twenty-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his first novel, only to suffer a…
In Capitol Hill, proximity is everything. It’s why the King Soopers there might have the tiniest, most frustrating jam of a parking lot in the city but remains a top shopping destination. Just down the block, there’s a video store called Videotique, a similarly cramped but popular spot for Cap…
Michael Winterbottom is multi-tasking — like that’s a surprise. He’s made a dozen films in the past decade, as varied as the Steve Coogan-as-Steve Coogan joints 24 Hour Party People and The Trip, the controversial Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, and two radically different assessments of the War…
As the general run of action films blithely defies the laws of gravity and consequence, what a pleasure to find a movie as grounded, physically and emotionally, as Daniel Espinosa’s downbeat pulper Easy Money. A hit in its native Sweden as Snabba Cash, the English title is a piece of…
This morning Forge Motion Pictures, NRS Films, and New Belgium Brewing released The Warrior, the fourth of five short films in Carbondale-based director Skip Armstrong’s series Of Souls + Water profiling a series of athletes and adventurers whose lives revolve around water in different ways. We’ve been following the series…
Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will get a special treat tonight, when National CineMedia brings two episodes of the classic series (complete with newly polished special effects) to the big screen, including the United Artists Denver Pavilions 15. That’s the good news. The less good news is the episodes…
Now in its fourth year, the Cinema Q Festival at the Denver FilmCenter showcases the many sides of GLBTQ film, with movies that capture everything from social-justice issues to stunningly accurate portrayals of everyday queer life. More than a dozen films, handpicked by programming director Keith Garcia, will be shown…
Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception as it is of Nolan’s superhero saga, now swollen into a trilogy…
One of out every five professional baseball players in the U.S. comes from the Dominican Republic. Take a second with that stat. Here’s another: Every big-league team runs a baseball academy on the island. Unless you follow baseball, you probably had little idea how important signing young Dominican players is…
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…
Not to knock films as fantastic as Rachel Getting Married, The Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, but there’s something wilder — or at least more directly stimulating and pure — about director Jonathan Demme’s live-performance docs. The 68-year-old auteur immortalized a Talking Heads show in Stop Making Sense,…
