Denver filmgoers, grab your boards for some cool waters headed our way as the 38th Denver Film Festival, produced by the Denver Film Society, has announced the first wave of programming for the event, this November 4 – 15. The festival has never announced this much programming ahead of its…
Forty years ago, the big crime news in this wide-lapel cowtown had nothing to do with six-year-old pageant queens, high-school shooters or feuding gangbangers. The obsession of the moment was the 1975 murder of businessman Hal Levine, and the prosecution of Michael Borelli, a supposedly mobbed-up former New York police…
Our nation’s movie boogeymen have been around for a long time. We’ve seen some of the classic movie monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy — so many times they just aren’t scary any more; with no element of surprise, the bogeymen are now our buddies. We’ve…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of a real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course,…
Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…
A documentary about a magazine is doomed never to capture the thing it’s documenting. The best that can be said for Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is that it captures, at times, the heady disbelief of paging through its subject, the National Lampoon, the headwaters of much of American…
In the late 1950s, Columbia Pictures packaged up 52 black-and-white monster movies made by Universal Studios and released them into television syndication. The package as a whole, consisting of both great and not-so-great movies, was called Shock Theater and it was followed by a second grouping called Son of Shock…
Jason Bosch’s ArgusFest has been “raising awareness since 2001,” bringing films, speakers and discussions of critical issues to Denver. But above all, films: For the past fourteen years, he’s screened films that might not otherwise be seen here, showing them in venues small and large. But now Bosch, who we named…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, mostly, since on-screen crooks…
There is much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to…
Colorado’s movie industry has taken off in fits and starts over the last 120 years, but while boosters are always hoping that more films will be made here, some of the movies already made in this state deserve far more attention than they’ve received. Our survey continues (see the first…
It’s time to put on makeup! It’s time to dim the lights! Because it’s October and the month is full of frights! Yes, the best movie-,watching month of the year is here (if you love horror movies — and if you don’t, then…) because art houses and cinemas, movie houses…
“My greatest hope is to provide people with a completely immersive experience, enveloping them in this world,” says Desireé Holman, an interdisciplinary artist whose work has a self-described “arm of anthropology.” The California-based artist is now putting the finishing touches on her exhibit Sophont in Action that will launch the Black Cube…
The Mile High Horror Film Festival is almost here, and that means it’s time to turn out the lights and scare yourself stupid. This year’s festival offers a slate of incredible retrospective films, from “respectable” classics like The Shining to gorehound favorites like Saw. Along with the old favorites, an impressive…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
The Alamo Drafthouse was buzzing yesterday with the appearance of legendary comedian Jack Black on the red carpet, alongside Goosebumps co-stars Odeya Rush, Dylan Minnette and Ryan Lee. The film, based on the beloved ’90s kids’ horror-book series, opens in theaters October 16 — but will kick off the Mile…
At long last, Geektober is almost here! Yes, the rest of the world may know it by its traditional name, October, but geeks know the month really belongs to us. Don’t believe it? Just have a look at Denver’s lineup of great geek fun for the month and you’ll be…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
Revered American crime novelist James Ellroy is coming to Denver this weekend to kick off an exciting new film series at the Alamo Drafthouse. On Saturday, September 26, Ellroy will host a screening of Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film L.A. Confidential, which was based on Ellroy’s novel of the same name. That…
“Giallo” translates to “yellow” in Italian, plain and simple — but when the word is used to denote a particular style of literature and film, it is terrifyingly more. The giallo genre comprises a stylish thriller that generally involves a masked killer stalking women and men alike, usually with revenge…
