A teenage witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…
Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s excellent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe knowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the…
Republicans are flag-flying rubes who drive enormous pickup trucks and lap up mass-produced reality dreck like it was a case of shitty domestic beer. Democrats are effete, pasty elitists who drink tea with their pinkies up and prefer “sophisticated” TV programs nobody cares about. These are the stereotypes basically confirmed…
The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg, in Cool It. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past…
In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in a flesh-colored, diaphanous cocktail dress, its halter top and tight bodice giving way to spilling tulle. This is the kind of dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the…
You know the drill: House gets messed up, tool-lugging good guys come in and save the day. That’s the constantly replaying plot on the DIY Network’s Disaster House, where the destruction is creative, but the denouement workman-like. Still, trying to figure out how Denver techno-guerrilla marching band Itchy-O got in…
Since sometime circa the late ’90s, Conan O’Brien has been the best of the late-night talk-show hosts. While Jay Leno did jokes so tame they would’ve felt just as at-home coming from a purple cartoon dog in the middle of the afternoon, Conan’s formula continued to feel fresh and relevant…
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…
Though based on actual 2001 events in Ohio that caused an unmanned freight train laden with toxic waste to go haywire, Unstoppable could just as well be set in the shining sun of Reagan’s 1980s. As the driverless locomotive begins gathering speed across rural Pennsylvania, bedecked with autumn leaves, it…
The glitz! The glamor! The desire for popcorn! The Starz Denver Film Festival began on Wednesday and continues through November 14, but this weekend promises to be a big one. You can get in on the action by reading Michael Roberts’s roundup of must-see movies provided by festival artistic director…
Sexy, hilarious, deep, irreverent, transcendent, unique, delightful, disturbing: The films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar are all these things and more, further buoyed by strong performances, memorable leading ladies and the director’s own inimitable imagination. And what could be more wonderful, on the brink of winter and hectic holidays-to-come, than…
In television history, perhaps no single show has ever been quite as revolutionary as The Jerry Springer Show — not that many people would see that as a good thing. All the same, over the course of its twenty-year history, Jerry Springer, along with a cast of strippers, transvestites, trailer-dwellers…
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…
Adapted from Valerie Plame and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoirs, the unsurprisingly validating Fair Game begins as a timeline-hopping international thriller of the countdown months to the Iraq War. Covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) and ex-ambassador husband Wilson (Sean Penn) are proverbial ships passing in the night, shuttling from Niger…
Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they’re unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle’s film — based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in…
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974, to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…
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…
