Lisa Ohlin’s Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one. Try to imagine low-rent Spielberg set in Sweden: whimsical children with intertwined fates, Nazis looming on the horizon, and…
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in fifty years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago, in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
The Loneliest Planet begins with a close-up trained on the body of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It’s not what it sounds like. Nica (Hani Furstenberg), on a pre-marriage honeymoon with fiancé Alex (Gael García Bernal) in rural Georgia, is in the midst of a makeshift shower. As Nica…
Ever wonder why zombies are so popular? Or why you have to destroy their brains to kill them? Or even what modifications your trusty Subaru might require in order to become an effective zombie apocalypse escape vehicle? All these questions and more will be addressed tomorrow, November 7, at the…
The heart of the noir genre is the hardboiled detective, but your typical noir doesn’t pit him against furries and Lucha Libre wrestlers. For that, you need a farce noir, and that’s exactly what you get with The Honey Cooler, debuting tomorrow, November 7, at the Hi-Dive. Farce and noir…
Colorado-based filmmakers won four of the top prizes at the 2012 Banff Mountain Film Festival in Banff, Canada on Sunday, including three awards to the Boulder-based Sender Films crew – all for films featured in the Reel Rock 7 video compilation and film tour – and one to Carbondale-based director…
“If I can avoid putting anything from the movie in the movie poster, then I’m doing okay,” says artist Jay Shaw. His film- poster art, which has taken off over the past year as he’s worked with Austin collectible art boutique Mondo, rarely includes characters, actors or anything from the…
When mountain climber and adventurer Erik Weihenmayer — who happens to be blind — set out to climb Mt. Everest more than a decade ago, a lot of people thought he was crazy, or worse: a danger to himself and others. They couldn’t believe any responsible guide would take him…
The Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, now in its 25th year, brings a strong, diverse selection of films to the region this weekend for viewing, discussion and celebration. The longest-running women-centered film festival in North America, it will showcase both fiction and non-fiction work starring, written, directed and filmed by…
Denver has zombie walks, zombie proms, zombie races, zombie car washes and zombie fashion shows, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a pair of Denver filmmakers have launched an ambitious zombie documentary. Alexandre O. Philippe and Robert Muratore, the pair behind the Star Wars doc The People Vs…
Andy Berg. A neo-abstract expressionist from Golden is the star of Andy Berg: Dialogue with the Unconscious at Rule Gallery. Though Berg got his training in the 1980s at the Kansas City Art Institute, life took him in other directions until 2009, when he began to exhibit his paintings again…
Movies about drugs and alcohol may be a dime(bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt’s Smashed is as much about recovery as it is about addiction, with Ponsoldt successfully making the case that the twelve steps can sometimes be more difficult than whatever necessitated them in the first place. Kate’s main…
The yammering about “Oscar gold” and Denzel Washington’s potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is a heavy, elemental melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray,…
It’s hard out there for a video-game villain: always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt, and forever pigeonholed into a role no one wants to see you escape. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game called…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer to adapt, looks less like a preview than a whole slate of coming attractions, so many and varied are the times and places that it touches down. The…
The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled disquisition on the colossal failure of the War on Drugs, rehashes much that will be familiar to even the most casual reader of newspapers: that this “war” is waged…
It’s a Sunday afternoon in New York, and Tom Tykwer and the filmmakers formerly known as the Wachowski Brothers are talking about Zardoz, that odd and ambitious 1974 science-fiction drama most infamous for featuring a gun-vomiting godhead and Sean Connery in a mankini. As a film that confronts viewers from…
At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future-Korea, I remember e-mailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy Shit.”…
Raconteuse, epigrammatist, mythomaniac and peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903-89) might have loved words as much as she loved Balenciaga. As Harold Koda of the Met’s Costume Institute, for which Vreeland served as a special consultant from 1973 until her death, memorably says in this often charming non-fiction bauble, “I…
Ask local filmmaker Paul Berry what BARK, showing at the Mercury Cafe this Wednesday, is “about,” and you end up with a shake-and-bake collection of themes and pop-culture references that include George Lucas, the Baghavad Gita, political satire, George W. Bush, buffalo on the moon and an implied post-modern anti-war…
As the first cousin of Project Runway celebrity Mondo Guerra, I can attest to the fact that Halloween in our extended family was always a treat. Since Halloween is one of Mondo’s favorite holidays, he’d decorate his parents’ house with cobwebs, tombstones and stuffed straw men, and on the big…
