Colorado Art Survey. Over the years, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant has relentlessly sought out and acquired new things for the institution’s permanent collection. In the current exhibit, Colorado Art Survey, he shows off some of these conquests and brings other things out of storage. There are some rarely seen…
Beer and sausage and mullets and mayhem are the stuff of a young Belgian teen’s upbringing in The Misfortunates, Felix Van Groeningen’s earthy adaptation of Dimitri Verhulst’s popular novel. Thirteen-year-old Gunther Stobbe (Kenneth Vanbaeden) plays little brother to four rowdy, strapping Stobbes — his hooting dad (Koen de Graeve) and…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche…of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s followup offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows —indicators of…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and Jules (Annette Bening…
Altered. This duet pairs abstract sculptor Mark Castator with realist painter Marie Vlasic, and though their works are unrelated, the show looks good anyway. Castator, a master with welded metal, is best known for his marvelous spheres and columns made from small pieces of sawed steel tubes. For these latest…
The grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy — featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) — moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the…
As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the six-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny — not like Toy Story 3.” Now, don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie. It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the…
Implicit in its title, the premise of The Killer Inside Me — directed by Michael Winterbottom from Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel — could be summed up in a classified ad: Texas cop with pleasant boyish demeanor seeks compliant dames for sadistic sex games culminating in murder. What complicates this tale is…
James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate…
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…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
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…
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble southern Missouri woods. But in Winter’s Bone, a…
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well — despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is…
You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he was a mouthy asshole instead? That’s the question posed by James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wannabe who seriously can’t shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone rogue…
Colorado & the West. This is the tenth summer in a row that David Cook Fine Art, the state’s premier purveyor of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century material, has presented a group show dedicated to historic Western art. This year’s version is anchored by more than two dozen oil paintings and watercolors…
Inspired by a drug ring that used Hasidic Jews to transport over one million pills of ecstasy to the United States in a six-month period between 1998 and 1999, Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers stars Jesse Eisenberg as a good old Brooklyn boy turned mid-level dope importer. Driven by the sense…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and eleven years after a colossally successful pre-millennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable standup comic throughout the course of her…
Colorado & the West. This is the tenth summer in a row that David Cook Fine Art, the state’s premier purveyor of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century material, has presented a group show dedicated to historic Western art. This year’s version is anchored by more than two dozen oil paintings and watercolors…
In the days of Cannes, Sundance and even the Starz Denver Film Festival, the Breckenridge Film Festival is an anomaly. The fest has managed to retain a truly indie vibe throughout its thirty years of existence; this year, you can catch 51 different independent dramas, comedies, documentaries, short films and…
Like its predecessor, 2010’s Harald Zwart-directed The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother (Taraji P. Henson) are introduced in the Detroit apartment that he grew up in, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to…
