Film, TV & Streaming

Fort Collins’s three-day TriMedia Film Festival showcases a handful of movies featuring recognizable faces, including Trucker, co-starring Michelle Monaghan and Nathan Fillion, and Broken Hill, with Timothy Hutton. But the curators also serve up a potpourri of more obscure offerings that encourage, and frequently reward, cinematic spelunking. Documentaries include Blue…

Big-Lots. This show comprises some very big abstract paintings by Wendi Harford that are strong and artistically ambitious. Harford earned a BFA at the University of Denver in the 1970s, where she studied with the late Beverly Rosen, and there are subtle references to her mentor’s influences throughout the show,…

Early in The Windmill Movie, filmmaker Richard P. Rogers, whose never-completed autobiographical project was knitted together by former student Alexander Olch after his 2001 death, wonders if chronicling his life using footage shot over decades qualifies as “a kind of jerking off.” Attendees are likely to be divided over this…

Mike Judge began writing the screenplay for Extract not long after Office Space opened and closed in a matter of weeks in the late winter of 1999. The two movies were always intended as bookends, with Extract countering the earlier film’s woe-is-me tale of the put-upon prole with its fucked-am-I…

Big-Lots.This show comprises some very big abstract paintings by Wendi Harford that are strong and artistically ambitious. Harford earned a BFA at the University of Denver in the 1970s, where she studied with the late Beverly Rosen, and there are subtle references to her mentor’s influences throughout the show, but…

Ghosted, opening this week, is a collection of potentially intriguing elements — emphasis on “potentially.” The action moves between Germany, the home of artist Sophie (Inga Busch), and Taiwan, the birthplace of her lover, Ai-Ling (Huan-Ru Ke), whose death prior to the start of the film leaves Sophie vulnerable to…

If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there,” the expression goes. And if you were, can you please stop gassing on about it? Aquarian Nostalgia™ is the most oppressively sanctimonious and dull stripe of reminiscing. Sure, the three free days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm passed without…

Finally, there’s a vampire movie worthy of the title The Hunger — even if it arrives under the more potable name Thirst. Carnal appetite, not a parched palate, is the accelerant that fuels this perverse, prankish and merrily anti-clerical exercise in bloodletting from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director whose…

Big-Lots. This show comprises some very big abstract paintings by Wendi Harford that are strong and artistically ambitious. Harford earned a BFA at the University of Denver in the 1970s, where she studied with the late Beverly Rosen, and there are subtle references to her mentor’s influences throughout the show,…

Early in Betty Blue, aspiring novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) declares, “She was like a flower with translucent antennae and a mauve plastic heart” in so solemn a tone that it practically dares the viewer to laugh. And so it goes throughout this divisively fleshy 1986 opus. Betty (Béatrice Dalle), who…

Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore…

Denver Artists Guild Founders. The history of the Denver Artists Guild — an early 20th-century group —- is little known, but it’s been documented in this show. The exhibit was organized by collectors Deborah Wadsworth and Cynthia Jennings, with a design by Steve Savageau. Wadsworth and Jennings identified 52 artists…

At first glance, Somers Town seems gritty and realistic, what with its handheld, black-and-white shots of working-class London and a cast dominated by actors who wouldn’t look glamorous even after a twelve-hour session with Paul Mitchell. But the film is shot through with a deep streak of whimsy that infuses…

The aliens have been with us for twenty years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…

In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside-down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The…

Childsplay. For this show, the floor of Walker Fine Art has been covered with rough-hewn playground equipment made of wood and bronze. And despite the show’s title, all of it has been made for, and scaled to, adults, who are meant to interact with the individual pieces. The mostly kinetic…

The cult that’s assembled around 2001’s Donnie Darko, which gets the Film on the Rocks treatment on Wednesday, August 12, seems motivated more by the size of writer/director Richard Kelly’s ambitions than by the goals he actually achieves. Simply put, the story of a troubled teen (Jake Gyllenhaal during his…

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies — which is to say, there’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia. But since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia (Fred Zinnemann’s penultimate feature in 1977), perhaps it was merely necessary to…

In the Loop doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the know. In Armando Iannucci’s movie, a satire of the run-up to war with a Middle Eastern country, it means that all the poor bastards are stuck in a loop, making the same bad decisions and tragic mistakes over and over again…

Charles Parson. This must-see sculpture solo titled Charles Parson: Personal Echoes on the Horizon, at Golden’s Foothills Art Center, begins out front with a trio of hieratically composed tubular metal sculptures — basically gongs. The viewer/participant is meant to strike the gongs with clappers that are chained to them. This…