Ten of the biggest new ski and snowboard films for this season will be screening this weekend at The Meeting Snowsports Film Festival in Aspen, an annual gathering of filmmakers, athletes and fans with events at the Wheeler Opera House and Belly Up. Films from Level 1 Productions, Teton Gravity…
Robert Mangold. The dean of Colorado sculpture, who’s been working for more than half a century, is the subject of this strong solo with the epic title Colorado Gold: The Many Facets of Robert Mangold at Z Art Department. The show represents something of a chaser to the major Mangold…
As someone who was in college when Napster happened, I’d love to see a period piece re-creating teen life during the last moments before technology began to change media consumption, communication, and the whole of social ritual. I wish The Perks of Being a Wallflower, written and directed by Stephen…
Early on in Rian Johnson’s time-travel thriller Looper, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self from thirty years in the future (Bruce Willis). When the younger Joe asks the older one about the specifics of temporal displacement, the latter dismisses the question, telling his interlocutor…
Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania’s de-fanged Count Dracula is introduced in an 1895-set prologue while serenading his infant daughter. No menacing carnivore, this Nosferatu has sworn off fatty human blood, is more scared of humans than…
The aspen aren’t the only things that turn golden in the fall. The cultural scene also glitters, as arts groups large and small, high-brow and low-, celebrated and secret, start their new seasons. To get straight to the art of the most exciting events in the months ahead, we went…
“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…
“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky said last week over the phone. “In America, especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie…
For Now Showing, the fall arts guide inserted in the September 27 issue of Westword, we asked dozens of luminaries on the local arts scene — including winners of the Westword MasterMind awards — to answer three questions: – Aside from your organization (or yourself), who is doing the most…
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…
Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a Saturday-morning staple for Gen X-ers who were, at the time, way older than the time slot’s intended audience, represented the pure, uncut mainstreaming of the late-1980s art scene in New York’s East Village. The first season was even shot on the upper floor of a former neighborhood…
There’s something startlingly noncommittal about many of the initial reviews of The Master that leaked out following the impromptu screenings that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson organized in 70mm-equipped houses across the country, and later in response to the film’s official bow at the Venice Film Festival. This is perhaps the…
The new, semi-gritty indie About Cherry is all about a semi-reluctant slide into the porn industry, and it’s also the first mainstream feature co-written by a busy porn actress, Lorelei Lee, otherwise famous for double penetrations and clothespin bondage. This shouldn’t strike us as very strange. Every screenwriter needs a…
A critic’s report from a film festival like Toronto, where something like 300 features were unveiled from September 6 through 16, can be something like a Rorschach test — or, at least, it can be something like the Rorschach test depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s TIFF entry, The Master, in…
The 35th Starz Denver Film Festival returns to the Mile High City from November 1 through 11, and is looking for volunteers to help both before and during the annual cinematic extravaganza…
Wayne White might be your favorite visual artist of the last few decades that you didn’t know existed. But that was sort of the point behind Beauty Is Embarrassing, director Neil Berkeley’s the documentary about White’s life and career thus far, which will screen at the Denver FilmCenter this Friday,…
Denver-based ski porn purveyors Level 1 Productions won big at the IF3 International Freeski Film Festival over the weekend in Montreal, with director Josh Berman and his team taking the top prize — Best North American Film — for their 2012 film Sunny, as well as Best Editing and Best…
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…
Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller gets a dead bead on extreme privilege, with Gere’s Madoff-like billionaire fund-runner scrambling to keep his personal empire from crumbling like crackers. He has everything — including a loving family, a hot French girlfriend (Laetitia Casta) and that warm…
It’s pretty Pollyannaish to complain when companies that are in the business of making money on movies make certain movies solely to make money. And yet it seems to be widely acceptable to be cynical about big-budget movies that are made, marketed and released in order to sate an appetite…
The blitzkrieg of award season is right around the corner, and with it, we can expect an onslaught of stunt performances designed to wow Academy voters and feature editors (and also viewers?) with their evident degrees of difficulty and demonstrable totality of transformation. With Daniel Day-Lewis having strapped on the…
The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a pair of initials, a prodigious talent who burst onto the scene with a stylish entry in the mid-’90s crime-thriller wave and never left. The master…
