This year’s Academy Award-nominated shorts offer a little something for every viewing temperament — though some categories require sitting through a lot of mediocre to get to the good. Of the five documentaries, Saving Face and God Is the Bigger Elvis were sadly not made available for critics, but the…
There’s huge buzz around Smash, a television show premiering at 9 p.m. tonight on NBC. A procedural drama depicting the creation of a musical about Marilyn Monroe, Smash features such big-name acting talent as Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing, as well as American Idol Katherine McPhee; Uma Thurman appears in…
At only 31 years old, filmmaker Ti West has quickly made a name for himself by challenging audience expectations and assumptions about the horror film genre with movies like 2009’s the House of the Devil. His latest film, The Innkeepers (read The Innkeepers movie review), opens Friday at the Denver…
You might have noticed that Jason Mewes didn’t utter a single four-letter word when we interviewed him about Kevin Smith: Live From Behind, a live recording of the duo’s podcast, which select movie theaters across the country will screen tonight. Find more details in our online calendar listings. We had…
On Thursday, February 2, movie theaters across the country will screen a one-time-only film: Kevin Smith: Live From Behind. The evening will comprise a live recording of Kevin Smith’s podcast with longtime pal (and film sidekick) Jason Mewes — but you probably know him better as the Jay to Smith’s…
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…
Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer’s political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography. Not that the subject is unworthy of anything but veneration: Unbowed by the racism that dogged him during the first several decades of his…
A Separation — which just received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Film — is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box. Dispensing with preliminaries, it opens at a judicial hearing where, both facing the camera that stands in for the…
Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-the-title breakthrough…
Denver is chock-full of storage facilities, which in turn are stuffed to the brim with things for which Denverites just can’t find room. Most of the time those things are as mundane as macaroni jewelry boxes and old recliners, but in a few of those storage units are hidden treasures…
Look! Up in the air! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a pterosaur! A what? When we think of prehistoric flying things, it’s usually the more well-known feathered dinosaurs, such as archeopteryx, that we conjure in our minds. But the pterosaur, which reached unbelievable sizes and was related…
Almost as if the producers new what a mistake they made with last week’s episode, this week they turned up the excitement with big guests and an even bigger challenge. The designers have been tasked with creating a garment inspired by a flavor of gelato to show to fashion legend…
Revisit the glory days of The Real World: Denver tomorrow night, when Tyrie Ballard, one of the cast members of the eighteenth incarnation of the reality show that held LoDo hostage five years ago, is featured in the opener of Real World, the Challenge: Battle of the Exes. In the…
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…
The hero of the red-herring heist flick Man on a Ledge draws two reactions from the Manhattan throng beneath his 21st-floor perch on a Midtown hotel. The first, of course, is the predictable “just get it over with” impatience of New Yorkers impeded by police barricades. The second is unlikely…
Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, co-writer and lead — brings to the screen the titular character of Albert Nobbs, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland, a role for which she won an Obie in 1982…
The locally produced teen flick 16-LOVE, directed by Denverite Adam Lipsius and starring Lindsay Shaw (The Howling and Pretty Little Liars) as a kid tennis phenom, premieres today at the Denver FilmCenter with screenings starting at 2 p.m. It’s a high school love story with a hard sports edge; though…
It’s only episode three of Project Runway All Stars, and already they’re jumping the shark by having the client for this week’s challenge be a fictional character. Not just a fictional character, but a fictional animal character. A fictional Muppet character. That’s right, the designers are making cocktail dresses for…
Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn’t like: After 2002’s The Hours, a lugubrious women’s-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008’s The Reader. Daldry’s logical next stop is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which, based on the sophomore novel…
There’s a point in Haywire when the film’s protagonist, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), gone rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, takes a fall while scaling down a drainpipe and hits the ground with a crunch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s…
After the first episode of Project Runway All Stars, my head was reeling from all the changes that Lifetime had made to the basic Project Runway model (as well as from all the fun everyone was having at the viewing party with Mondo Guerra at Beauty Bar, the first in…
Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner’s Sweetgrass Productions film Solitaire — documenting two years exploring South American backcountry terrain on a human-powered trek around Argentina, Peru, and Chilean Patagonia — was the year’s most surprising ski film, winning the Best Cinematography award at the IF3 International Ski Film Festival and earning Waggoner…
