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…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
The Colorado Independent Women in Film program, an annual three-day event at the Bug Theatre that showcases the work of women in the Colorado film industry, opens tomorrow. Packed, a short documentary that follows evacuees of Boulder’s Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010 and describes the possessions they collected on their…
Last weekend, more than fifty teams of local filmmakers wrote, shot and edited entire film in 48 hours. Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the film they made had to be in a genre selected at random, and incorporate a line of dialogue and prop that…
This deft, atmospheric Errol Morris-style tour through the phenomenon that is “serial imposter” Frédéric Bourdin homes in on one brief episode from the man’s berserk career: the period in 1997 when the 23-year-old Frenchman convinced a Texas family that he was their disappeared teenage son. This is already well-trod territory,…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books: They’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series up…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less successful 1996 campaign…
In mid-August, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far landed on the red planet. The Curiosity Rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of life, study its climate and geology, and collect data that might help future manned missions. To get in the spirit, we’ve combed…
For many, especially black people who see in her a mockery of our own grandmothers, Tyler Perry’s Madea is little more than a mammy — an insult to the matriarchal community figure that Perry claims to celebrate. And unforgivably, when compared to Flip Wilson’s Geraldine or even Martin Lawrence’s Big…
“I’ll just tell you straight out: Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin admits. This is really something coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious—I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away from her…
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn’t mean Total Recall isn’t ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produced by the…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a fifteen-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as “the Voice.” Houston’s pipes…
One of the most interesting things about Cosmopolis, writer/director David Cronenberg’s extraordinary adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel by the same name, is that it’s based on the first script Cronenberg has both written and shot since 1999’s eXistenZ. Additionally, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis marks the first time he has adapted…
There is no Denver Memorial Hospital. But if there were, we’d bet it wouldn’t be in Vancouver. Sadly, that’s where the upcoming CW television series Emily Owens, M.D., set at the fictional Denver Memorial Hospital, is being filmed. The show, which stars actress Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter) as a…
Colorado has become the Hollywood of the adventure-film business, and the local ski-porn premiere season will be in full swing by this time next month. But the Colorado-based crews at Matchstick Productions (MSP), Level 1 Productions and Stept Productions have already released tantalizing teasers for their 2012 films. Here’s a…
This Sunday, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far will land on the red planet. The Curiosity Rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of life, study its climate and geology and collect data that might help future manned missions. The Denver Museum of Nature and…
Vividly bringing to life the question of whether self-denial is a social responsibility that Don DeLillo poses in Cosmopolis, Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, tracks the post-crash lifestyle of rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude. The titular royal is Jackie Siegel,…
It’s one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring emotional hangups, is discovered as a swan by a clearly out-of-his-league girl who loves him just the way he is. Buffalo ’66 (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love…
Joachim Trier has proven to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The twenty-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his first novel, only to suffer a…
In Capitol Hill, proximity is everything. It’s why the King Soopers there might have the tiniest, most frustrating jam of a parking lot in the city but remains a top shopping destination. Just down the block, there’s a video store called Videotique, a similarly cramped but popular spot for Cap…
