Again this year, Starz 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, Withey highlights three films: Friday’s The Search for Emak Bakia, Saturday’s…
This year marks the 36th opening night for the Denver Film Festival, and like the previous 35, last night’s kickoff event took place against a backdrop of glitter, glamour and anticipation. And if director Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, which unspooled at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House before many of the…
Do you like movies? Of course you do. What geek doesn’t? The good news is that for the next ten days the Starz Denver Film Fest, one of Denver’s premiere cultural events, is going to be bringing a lot of movies to town for you to watch. The less good…
Again this year, Starz 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 shares his take on Resurrection of a Bastard…
Barbara Carpenter and Janice McDonald. In the east gallery at Spark, Barbara Carpenter has assembled a large group of small photos hung in clusters, salon-style, for Walking Miss Daisy: Photographs by Barbara Carpenter. The Miss Daisy of the title is Carpenter’s dog, and all of the photos have been taken…
The inability to have a child is often treated as a “white people problem,” the province of middle- and upper-class couples who end up resorting to expensive fertility treatments. But Andrew Dosunmu’s supple, observant drama Mother of George puts a different spin on this anguishing issue: What happens when a…
Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying titan with…
Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained sixty pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds — he looked like a walking,…
It was a sad day when television switched from analog to digital. People had to go out and buy antennas and converter boxes just to watch basic television that had been free forever. Those antennas were never quite reliable, though, and while cable was more consistent, it was also more…
Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2012 MVLFFLLC. TM &2012 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.Thor: The Dark World just doesn’t compare to the 2011 original, in spite of its few redeeming qualities. That’s the consensus among this paper’s film critics on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, available now. Listen to…
It’s that time again — the Starz Denver Film Fest is here, bringing joy for the cinephile girls and boys. With almost 200 films in every genre, from all over the world, there’s a lot to take in. To help navigate the schedule, we asked festival programmer Matt Campbell to…
Again this year, Starz 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 previews the festival, which runs November 6-17, and talks about…
Al Wynne. As many know, the Black Forest home and studio shared for more than sixty years by the late Al Wynne and his widow, Lou Wynne, was utterly destroyed by fire this summer. The conflagration took some 400 works by Al in the form of watercolors and drawings, constituting…
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The true story it tells is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana. His captivity…
Attention, children! Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, and unless the cook in your household provides a vegetarian option, that means turkey — a bird that has been raised to be axed, packaged, and raced to your grocer’s freezer, ultimately to wing its way onto your family’s table. There it…
The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth. In his first original screenplay written directly for the screen, novelist Cormac McCarthy takes a holiday from the apocalyptic portentousness of his No Country for Old Men and…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore on screen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges.Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers Club (opening in Denver next week), playing AIDS victim,…
The entertainment industry, with its long-established allergy to new ideas, often mines the bestseller list for source material. Studios are more likely greenlight a scary story after it has been officially vetted by the reading public, and less likely to interfere with a proven earner. In horror cinema, however, the filmmaker’s vision of a story so often becomes definitive in the minds of viewers that it overshadows the books that inspired that vision in the first place. With that in mind, the Westword Book Club has compiled a list of 6 cult classic horror that were inspired by novels and short stories, deliberately avoiding canonical works like Dracula and Frankenstein as well as blockbusters like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby in favor of slightly obscure titles that deserve more eyeballs. Then we Lars von Trier’ed ourselves into a corner by only selecting movies that are available to stream instantly, so you’ll have time to check these out before the Halloween spirit is buried beneath the snows of November. Enjoy your nightmares.
