In any marital dispute, sometimes you need a little outside input; you think you’re right, they think they’re right — you need someone objective to come in and make the call. Problem is, every time you call in somebody objective, you somehow end up pantsless, in handcuffs and covered in…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem “Howl” is essentially performative — and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasi-biographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie — which, in addition to touching on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming out), dramatizes the poem’s…
When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by Zalachenko, her barbaric…
Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s followup to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires less shock and awe than sickening ire. The movie opens with the cautionary tale of little Iceland, an idyllic nation so stable that, as put by one local, it enjoyed “almost…
The Starz Denver Film Festival has announced its film lineup for this year’s twelve-day extravaganza, and it includes a lead-off production directed by George Hickenlooper, the mayor’s cousin, which will open the new Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. All told the fest, November 3-14, will showcase 200 movies, as well as receptions, panel…
For the most part, film trailers are pretty similar. There’s some expository dialog early on to get you oriented to what’s happening, and from there they kind of take you through the highlights of the film: The major plot points, the best one-liners, the baddest-ass explosions or fight scenes. They’re…
Landmark Theatres, which is known in Denver for its unusual or historic movie houses and its lineup of arty, foreign and independent flicks, said Tuesday that is has purchased the AMC Olde Town 14, a fifteen-year-old mainstream multiplex in Arvada. The addition of the Old Town 14 – effective this…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off: In Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has been in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of the cornrowed…
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who…
A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void unfolds in four major parts. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing American in Tokyo with an unusually close relationship to his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), and…
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest: Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich and Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss) can spruce up any pulp. As far as comic-book adaptations go, though, Red is a little closer to the bright side of…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
Nowhere Boy, English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon, concludes, as well it should, with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream, “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it…
Kept afloat by a great cast, Woody Allen’s latest foray into the perverse follies of mankind begins with a statutory quote from Macbeth about the futility of it all. But like so much of Allen’s work over the past decade, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is more Bergman-lite…
It was only a matter of time before South Park took on The Jersey Shore — actually, it’s pretty surprising it didn’t come sooner. Featuring a real-life cast of possibly the most vapid, melodramatic, self-aggrandizing assholes on earth (they’re sweet in their own dumb way, too — we get it),…
Denver’s a great place for fans of the big five of genre film (that’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror, exploitation and cult), as every week we get a generous helping of selections to choose from. As usual, we’re rounding up your options for the weekend to come and the following week, and…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
Horses make lousy protagonists, what with their inability to speak, emote, or do much of anything other than run or stand around. No surprise, then, that Secretariat employs its subject as merely a vehicle for a human-victory-over-adversity story, which, in this based-on-real-events case, involves owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) triumphing…
A film seemingly designed to get every New York City honors student face-punched at college, It’s Kind of a Funny Story chronicles a privileged Brooklyn high-schooler’s super-cool institutionalized mental-health break. Hot for his best friend’s girlfriend, stressed out over an application to a prestigious summer school and audaciously neglectful of…
A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary, Seth Gordon’s anthology Freakonomics pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book of pop math and hands them over to famous doc filmmakers to make their own. Gordon (King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts…
