Call it a quarter-life crisis: Andy Raney does. Because before watching the documentary that resulted, it’s slightly difficult to imagine why two adult males — Raney and co-creator Jeremy Make — would travel the United States in a used and dilapidated golf kart named Christine for a hundred days, moving…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius eases neophytes’ discomfort by creating the cinematic equivalent of an amuse-bouche. Although many of the technical aspects of the silent…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher’s sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster directed by Niels Arden Oplev from Stieg Larsson’s rambling thriller — a posthumously published international bestseller and Kindle record-holder — is a recognizably Fincherian caper. The movie, which…
When I told someone I was off to a screening of We Bought a Zoo the other day, the response was an eye roll. The reaction’s understandable: Save for two music docs — an Elton John-Leon Russell album making-of and that Pearl Jam anniversary infomercial — Cameron Crowe has been…
The spirit of gift-giving seems to have gotten seriously lost, what with people getting seasoned with pepper-spray and countless hordes of poor suckers using their credit cards like drunken whores. So why not say “Fuck Mastercard!” and give some affordable presents that everyone on your list will appreciate — and…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About twenty minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure (a revelatory Zoé Héran), a…
Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…
Steve McQueen’s first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008’s Hunger, it’s a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender’s imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
The word “disabled” continues to shed meaning this week as many of the biggest names in adaptive sports are in Breckenridge for the Disabled Sports USA Hartford Ski Spectacular, an annual winter sports festival that brings hundreds of athletes and aspiring athletes to Colorado for adaptive ski and snowboard lessons,…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
That this film was originally titled Goethe! should give you a sense of how much silly sturm und drang boosterism awaits. A biopic more fiction than fact, Young Goethe in Love opens in 1772, when the 23-year-old aspiring poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) flunks his bar…
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer’s finest, is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: the colorless bureaucratic master-spook George Smiley and the double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence whom Smiley must unmask. Although…
Flea almost cries. Twice. There’s your four-word summation of The Other F Word, a half-poignant, half-absurd documentary on punk-rocker dads, self-described as “a coming-of-middle-age story” that thrills to the sight of, say, Rancid’s Lars Frederiksen, who looks as though a tattoo parlor and a Claire’s fell on him simultaneously, sauntering…
Before writing The Descendants, and before indie-film-world-big-deal-director Alexander Payne turned her novel into a George Clooney movie, Kaui Hart Hemmings worked at Westword, selling classified ads. In 1999, right out of Colorado College, the Hawaii native got her first job with us. “Had no idea what the hell to do…
The sports movie is rarely versatile: an outsider, or group of outsiders (wrong race, wrong gender, wrong species), have uncanny talent in their field, but the old guard (typically, white, old men), don’t like the change the new person represents. So the rebels have to use their talent to blow…
Lawrence Dai will be watching Julie & Julia for the 365th time at 8 p.m. tonight at the Jones, as part of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s quirky Off-Center series. In addition to the screening, there will be free beer and unelaborated-upon shenanigans involving onions; tickets are $10. Julie &…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
Fellow anthemic NPR darlings Arcade Fire and Radiohead might fiercely divide public opinion, but there aren’t a lot of Sigur Rós haters: People either love the Icelandic post-rock band or are content to let their ethereal sounds fade into the background. It follows that there probably aren’t going to be…
Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is something of a comeback for the Finnish filmmaker. His warmhearted comedy of underdog working-class solidarity, made with a mixed Finnish-French-Senegalese cast in the French port city Le Havre, was the most warmly received movie — at least by the press — shown last May in…
Eating, more or less, is the hallmark of the holidays (not to mention a cornerstone of the e-card industry) — Thanksgiving, in particular. So, whether your family-time is a drunken-uncle disaster, a Leave it to Beaver affair or something in between, at least you have some turkey, gravy and mashed…
