Now Showing

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…

On the Ice crosses River’s Edge and The Fast Runner

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…

21 Jump Street acknowledges its own superfluousness

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…

Jeff, who lives at home, is a slacker who wants to stand tall

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…

Project Runway All Stars trims down to the final three

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…

Now Showing

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…

Norwegian Wood drifts far from its source into dull melodrama

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…

Chico & Rita offers dazzling animation but a lackluster plot

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…

Silent House briefly ups the horror-film ante

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…

Now Showing

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…

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie has a pure destructive impulse

The Turin Horse not excepted, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, a comedy, is the most startlingly apocalyptic film of the year. As in their Adult Swim Awesome Show, the abiding aesthetic is free-associative channel-surfing, owing something to the public-access mash-ups of TV Carnage. (The attrition of this is significantly…

Holocaust tale In Darkness strikes a familiar chord

Holocaust culture has proven to be essentially infinite: Nearly seventy years since the end of World War II, and untold stories of decimation and survival are still hitting the mainstream, with no light at the end of the tunnel. Agnieszka Holland’s new film, In Darkness, opens a scab perhaps only…

Colorado skaters, filmmakers, skateshops put their heads together for Malfunction

Collaboration is the new competition, and eight of Colorado’s coolest local skate shops and skateboard brands are banding together in an unprecedented partnership to release Malfunction, a new video from filmmakers Brandon Greer, Corey Miller, and Travis La featuring skaters James Batcheller, Dan Hunter, Scott Johnson, Mike Marks and Garrett…

Saving Face and The Descendants link Colorado to Oscar wins

Colorado-based filmmaker Daniel Junge won an Oscar tonight for Saving Face, the short documentary film that follows a Pakistani plastic surgeon dedicated to performing reconstructive surgery on women who’ve been attacked with acid. Read an interview with Junge about Saving Face…

MACC Jewish Film Festival opens today

The Mizel Arts and Culture Center will launch the sixteenth annual Jewish Film Festival today. “This is our most far-reaching event,” says Lisa Korsen, marketing director for MACC. “It’s where we get our most diverse audience, patrons who may not be Jewish but are interested in the culture. We have…