The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy’s comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” without anybody ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and…
New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who’s feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when “aspiring” really means not cutting it. Life with…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro—freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies—is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America. He’s a veteran, but he’s treated…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Daniel Mindel, A.S.C., is part of an ever-shrinking population: cinematographers who have yet to shoot a feature digitally. He acknowledges that he “will be forced” to do it eventually by “the corporate entities that drive our industry,” but he believes “there is no need to use an inferior technology at…
Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an “only-in-France aging cream.” If sun…
The Israeli arranged-marriage drama Fill the Void begins as a spy caper. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) and her mother (Irit Sheleg) play P.I. at the supermarket, observing a handsome asthmatic with gold-rim glasses and a gawky frame to see if he’s marriage material. Satisfied with the way he reads the…
Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6, makes unabashedly populist blockbusters for mainstream audiences—hardly the purview of a “serious” artist. His films, wafer-thin in…
You know those two little lines you get in your forehead when you frown? The ones that, if you frown too much, stick there for good? The French have a name for that: “the lion wrinkle.” And by the tenth day of Cannes, there are a lot of lion wrinkles…
The first film by Martin Scorcese that truly wore his mark, Mean Streets is a small and personal tour de force, held together by a killer jukebox score and the explosive on-screen meeting of Robert De Niro (as the ne’er-do-well gambler, Johnny Boy) and Harvey Keitel (as Charlie, a conflicted…
Ryan Demers, a Denver-based filmmaker, is the co-founder of Gaylord St. Productions, and has managed the impressive feat of helming two independent films without going completely bankrupt and abandoning the dream. The Honey Cooler, a farcical detective story set in the milieu of an economically depressed Denver rife with furries. In this week’s edition of Westword Book Club, Demers discusses his noir influences, politics, primary sources and trying to avoid being derivative.
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
A trashy vampire flick in art-film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences, including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as she…
Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Seemingly crafted to validate the fears of those conservatives who rage that the white man can’t get respect on the big screen these days, the smart-till-it-isn’t thriller Black Rock centers on a tense scene of hero-pantsing and gender inversion. The piece-of-shit bad guys, a couple of vets of our desert…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than SparkNotes is a high-quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shhh! Don’t tell the eighth-graders about Gregory Peck’s…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a seventeen-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
One of the most exciting things about attending the Cannes Film Festival is being among the first people to see the films the world will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
On the surface, Darren Aronofsky’s bleak masterpiece Requiem for a Dream, the screwball musical nun-comedy of Sister Act and a spaghetti Western from Thailand don’t have much in common. In the eyes of Denver Film Society programming director Keith Garcia, they all share one important trait: They’re good movies that…
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
