Colorado-based photographer Pete McBride’s film Chasing Water, the companion to his book The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict, won the Adventure Through Activism Award over the weekend at the 2011 Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, one of two $500 cash prizes awarded this year (see trailer at www.PeteMcBride.com). The other…
The Starz Denver Film Festival offers the chance to hear directly from filmmakers and, sometimes, a film’s subject. An example: The Friday showing of Wish Me Away, a new doc about country singer Chely Wright’s decision to come out as a lesbian. The film was interesting, but better yet was…
Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he shares choices for Friday through Sunday, November 4-6: The Fairy,…
“It’s a forced near-death experience,” says Nick Polizzi about Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink used in the Amazon region to cure everything from depression to cancer. Polizzi the Denver-based director of the Sacred Science, a documentary which takes eight very sick people from the United States and Australia and drops them…
Adam Leech, who owns Leechpit, a vintage clothing and collectibles store in Colorado Springs, has been obsessed for years by an unusual folk art form called hobo nickels. Starting with buffalo nickels, which were made by the U.S. Mint from 1913 to 1938, hobo nickel artists carve their own caricatures,…
Director Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, featured at the 2011 Starz Denver Film Festival, is a feel-bad movie that’s been declared a masterpiece. So universal has been the acclaim that anyone who begs to differ is in danger of being declared an ignoramus or a philistine. But what the hell: I’ll…
Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Here, he shares his take on tonight’s opener at Denver FilmCenter/Colfax: Melancholia…
Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the close-second candidate to be attributed authorship of the 37 plays of William Shakespeare — who, due to the troublesome existence of evidence, remains the general favorite. De Vere, played as a figure of regal isolation by Rhys Ifans, is the protagonist…
As taut and economical as its title is unwieldy, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene — a first feature that won the Best Director award last January at Sundance — is a deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories…
The revolution will not be televised.” So Gil Scott-Heron asserted in 1970, and so it was not — at least not on American TV. As demonstrated by The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, however, Swedish television was another story. Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary assembled by…
Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…
Riffing on how outlaw Butch Cassidy’s life might have gone had he survived in South America, this modest oater should tickle Western fans. (I assume there are a few of us left.) Blackthorn finds Cassidy (Sam Shepard) still in Bolivia, breeding horses, bedding his Indian housekeeper (Magaly Solier) and making…
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary is what the Brits might call a rum movie — an oddly inoffensive piece and a personal project for its disconcertingly unengaged star Johnny Depp. The movie adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s and published, under…
The groundbreaking sci-fi series The Twilight Zone is still socially relevant, and it’s also inspired much social satire since it first appeared on television sets in 1959. The homage and spoofs range from many Simpsons episodes to a Melvins song to the Theater Company of Lafayette’s Return to the Twilight…
Over half a century after Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone first aired, people are still captivated by the sci-fi show. So in advance of the Theater Company of Lafayette’s production of Return to the Twilight Zone (Volume 8), A Parody, which opens tomorrow night at the Mary Miller Theater ,…
Every sensible person knows that when Earth is eventually destroyed, it will be by a huge asteroid like the one that killed all the dinosaurs. We learned this mostly from Jerry Bruckheimer, but Jerry Bruckheimer probably learned it from the 1979 classic Meteor, the first movie ever about humans saving…
Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…
Isabelle Huppert’s cerebral, prickly, glacial screen presence — which she has calibrated throughout her career to portray gorgeously complex women — is never less than magnetic. That’s why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep…
Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freakout. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
You can start planning now: The schedule for the 34th annual Starz Denver Film Festival, which runs November 2 through 13 at various venues throughout town, is now available online at the user-friendly Denver Film Society website. DFS member early ticketing opens Wednesday, October 19; the rest of the hoi…
