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…
Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous, freewheeling, semi-autobiographical Something in the Air is an ode to both youth’s universal qualities and the specifics of Assayas’s youth in particular. The picture opens in the suburbs just outside Paris in 1971, among a group of teenage students still energized by the explosive student and worker…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to project whatever…
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and were also, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I found myself more and more often invoking the name of Ray Harryhausen, who died on Tuesday, May 7,…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days, he prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are…
Anyone who’s familiar with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford should recognize the scenes and shots from trailers for the 2013 version, which opens Friday with Leonardo DiCaprio. Here, in animated GIFs, are shot-by-shot comparisons from the 1974 version and the 2013 version — which will…
The idea for The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival began when poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins realized he was the guy who could make it happen. “I’m a video poet and had a lot of success with my stuff overseas — I was noticing a lot of really talented filmmakers…
Good things sometimes come in small packages, and that’s certainly the case with Westword MasterMind Johnny Morehouse’s long-running Five Minute Film Fest, a showcase of short shorts that pack a lot of punch in five minutes or less. Its latest incarnation has found a home at Deer Pile, and because…
