Film, TV & Streaming

The fortieth annual Denver Film Festival got off to a fine start with Lady Bird, an opening night flick well worth discovering. Since then, the event’s attendance has been impressive despite a lack of star power on par with Emma Stone’s appearance for La La Land last year and the mixed quality of the six movies I caught during the fest’s first weekend. Note that a Q&A with costar Kyra Sedgwick on November 3 barely mentioned Submission, the DFF’s centerpiece presentation at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for which she was ostensibly on-hand, and no one seemed to care.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, BPM (Beats Per Minute), French director Robin Campillo’s stylized, moving drama of AIDS activism and love, sometimes feels like several films at once. It follows the activities of ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s, and for much…

Jane arrives in theaters on October 20 On Sept. 11, 2001, renowned primatologist and environmental advocate Jane Goodall was in New York on business. She had planned to catch a flight out to visit a high school to give a talk on how we can find a reason to hope…

From what little we’re given of Kurt in the trailers, Gibson seems to be playing a caricature of his own darker side, a tiresomely inappropriate, unapologetic button-pusher

“Thelma is a film from Norway that’s actually the country’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey. “It’s an interesting film of the type that you don’t necessarily find in film festivals all that often. It’s sort of a supernatural, paranormal thriller, but a really intriguing one.”

Yes, it’s hard to imagine wanting to watch 11/8/16 today. The film, a sweeping survey documentary created and produced by Jeff Deutchman, follows 16 Americans from across the country on election day of 2016: a Sikh New York cabdriver, a “Dreamer” in San Jose, a Massachusetts dad in a MAGA…

Again this year, 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 spotlights a selections for November 3, 4 and 5: Have a Nice Day, Vigilante and Strad Style.

The 40th annual Denver Film Festival’s kick-off last night, November 1, at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House was a decidedly low-key affair, especially in comparison to the 2016 launch, when future Oscar winner Emma Stone strolled the red carpet prior to a preview of the left-field blockbuster musical La La Land. But while star power was decidedly absent, the evening scored anyhow thanks largely to viewers’ discovery of Lady Bird, an opening-night selection that offered the sort of pleasant surprise the DFF shoots for every time the theater lights go down.

“The Party is a dark comedy with a great cast,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey. “Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Cillian Murphy. “But it’s also a small film — and by that, I mean it all takes place in this one little town home, almost entirely in the living room. There’s a bit in the kitchen and in the back yard, but it’s very spare location-wise.”

Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show streams on Hulu Toward the end of the excellent new documentary, Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show, Dana Carvey describes the final installment of a bit that ran throughout his…

It’s not enough that the sitting president will hate Rob Reiner’s LBJ, but that’s not nothing, either. Here’s a portrait of a resolutely unlovable vulgarian who, due to a cruel accident of history, ascends to the Oval Office. But it’s the distinctions that will sting: In the opening moments, a…

It’s November! Which means that we’ve almost survived this year and I think that calls for a little celebration. How should we celebrate? Probably with lots of liquor. It’s been a tough one, but also TV! Nov. 2: Young Sheldon, CBS And on the seventh day, God planted the idea…

Again this year, 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 spotlights the offering for opening night, November 1 — Lady Bird — and previews the festival’s 40th edition as a whole.

For all his reputation as a capital-A Auteur, Todd Haynes has always demonstrated impressive stylistic versatility. The Sirkian pastiche of Far from Heaven is a far cry from the lo-fi expressionism of Poison, and the music video wonderland of Velvet Goldmine has relatively little in common with the fractured minimalism…

Like most of the better Marvel efforts, Thor: Ragnarok feels like the work of a unique sensibility instead of a huddle of brand managers. While the studio’s films demonstrated plenty of comic flair right from the start of its shared-universe experiment, with 2008’s Iron Man, recent efforts have veered too…

This piece has spoilers for the first six episodes of the second season of Stranger Things. Look, I like the show, but the title is a lie. Seemingly inspired by that one line from Hamlet that I kept hearing in presentations the time I reported on a UFO convention, the…

All the Places, an adventure film series about immersive travel that examines the relationship between food, culture, sport and environment, screens at REI in Denver on Thursday, October 26.

Maybe it’s encouraging, in a way, that an America in crisis struggles so mightily to make crowd-pleasing war movies. Whatever their politics, no studio exec today would let a wide-release desert-war drama come right out and say what even the GOP increasingly admits: that Iraq was a mistake, that Afghanistan has…

If you’re looking to get into the spirit of the season, here are thirteen terror-filled films – including creature features, slashers, ghost stories, musicals and even a documentary – screening around Denver this week.

From the perspective of a certain kind of rarefied, globalized movie nerd, we’re living in the era of Hou, even if most culture consumers don’t know it. Hou Hsiao-hsien has become something of the art-house-film gold standard worldwide in the last few decades, building one of the world’s most rigorous…

This fall, mainstream films are subverting expectations all over the place. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! proved too much for some audiences looking for a moody drama who were then shocked by gory, allegorical narrative. Blade Runner 2049 sloughed off most of its predecessor’s lower-brow populist action for a somber tone and…

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix Joan Didion has set an impossible standard for any documentarian who would want to cover her life. She’s essentially already done it herself, brilliantly, in her essays, novels and films. Still, Didion’s nephew, actor/director Griffin Dunne, takes a…