Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is a polite Jewish boy from fictional Orangetown, Massachusetts, whose one God-given talent is having a skull made of granite and, on command, a rock-’em-sock-’em left-right combination. Doug is a bouncer, but his middle-class parents (Eugene Levy and Ellen David), in denial that their son…
This is not the best time of year for new movies. So we have Wrath of the Titans, Mirror Mirror and American Reunion. Judging by the box office receipts, you went and saw Hunger Games like everyone else, and were probably were angry that Jennifer Lawrence is too fat and…
Gary Emrich. Though paintings and sculptures are the stock-in-trade of its Modern and Contemporary department, the Denver Art Museum also puts the spotlight on new media, such as video, in its own dedicated space, called the Fuse Box. That’s where Gary Emrich: Contact is midway through its run. Emrich, whose…
Soft-spoken Harvard poli-sci professor Gene Sharp is an unlikely mentor for the architects of the Arab Spring. But as first-time documentarian Ruaridh Arrow reveals and ultimately belabors, Sharp’s 1993 handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy helped influence the resistance movements in Egypt and Syria and, before that, in Serbia, the Ukraine,…
Suelynn Gustafson was doing goth before it was cool. In fact, Suelynn Gustafson was doing goth about five decades before anyone even thought to call it goth, let alone cool, and furthermore, she doesn’t mind telling you that she doesn’t think much of the teenyboppers doing it today. “I think…
There’s a lot of mythologizing in All In, an adoring, exhaustive survey of the last decade’s poker boom and its impact on the culture. Director Douglas Tirola tries so hard to make poker a central metaphor for the new American Dream that at times the relentless stream of hot air…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a forty-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his sixty-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
Director Joshua Marston demonstrated his ability to sustain almost unbearable dramatic tension in his debut feature film, Maria Full of Grace. His sophomore effort, The Forgiveness of Blood, illustrates an impressive deepening of that skill. Working from a script co-written by Andamion Murataj and with a cast of non-professional actors…
If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’s astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Being Flynn is an adaptation of Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which explored the author’s pivotal experience working at the Boston homeless shelter where his down-and-out dad, Jonathan, was a frequent guest. In the movie, Paul Dano and Robert…
Although Roger Ebert’s health problems prevent him from participating in the World Affairs Conference, the annual intellectual orgy that’s coming to Boulder from April 9 through April 13, the film critic’s interruptus program is still a featured attraction — and is now named after him. This year’s film? Tinker Tailor…
CREEP! is a movie about the making of a movie whose biggest star is a phallic monster made out of a rug. The monster is from outer space and it’s hungry. Oh, and its mouth? It looks like a vagina. The CREEP! crew, including Colorado Springs-based director Pete Schuermann, launched…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
If I said “Eskimo hip-hop crime tale,” would that send you running to the nearest sunny beach? Shot on location in far northern Alaska with a native cast and writer/director (Andrew Okpeaha MacLean), On the Ice is a marvel of concentrated, classical storytelling. The flat, snowy landscape strips away all…
The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high-schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 — one year after the network premiered — and ran until 1991, launching the career of Johnny Depp (who cameos here along with former castmate Holly Robinson Peete). As a sign of…
It’s obvious that Jason Segel has a face for comedy. He’s got a lumpy, sad-sack mug with a dozen inflections to register disappointment, confusion and self-doubt. But as the basement-dwelling hero in the Duplass brothers’ new quest movie, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Segel works his entire posture for laughs…
Last night on Project Runway All Stars, the challenge for the four remaining designers was to create a ready-to-wear outfit for designer and guest judge Nanette Lepore’s line that was “irresistible, feminine and timeless.” The winning design would be featured on the Nanette Lepore label, and profits from its sale…
AB EX. Several Denver art venues are presenting shows to salute the opening this past fall of the Clyfford Still Museum, with most featuring displays anchored by abstracts. A stunningly beautiful example of this is AB EX: Positions and Dispositions, at the capacious Robischon Gallery. The exhibit comprises five discrete…
Director-screenwriter Tran Anh Hung crams Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood into two and a half hours that offer barely a hint of the beloved 1987 cult novel’s true flavor. Not completely surprising given its elusive, ostensibly soap-operatic narrative: Toru Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama), a teenage college student in 1967 Tokyo, struggles with…
The Oscar-nominated animated musical Chico & Rita opens with a jaw-dropping swoop over modern-day Cuba, a well-grimed and bustling island of densely packed buildings that, here, is immaculately detailed and tinted just so as to make it beam even in squalor. Chico & Rita deserves credit for being the rare…
The foundations of Silent House are laid atop La Casa Muda, a nil-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film that enjoyed an afterlife in international film festivals. It is not surprising that La Casa Muda was hastily snapped up for an English-language remake, for the concept is the sort of low-overhead, trend-conscious…
