Michael Winterbottom is multi-tasking — like that’s a surprise. He’s made a dozen films in the past decade, as varied as the Steve Coogan-as-Steve Coogan joints 24 Hour Party People and The Trip, the controversial Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, and two radically different assessments of the War…
As the general run of action films blithely defies the laws of gravity and consequence, what a pleasure to find a movie as grounded, physically and emotionally, as Daniel Espinosa’s downbeat pulper Easy Money. A hit in its native Sweden as Snabba Cash, the English title is a piece of…
This morning Forge Motion Pictures, NRS Films, and New Belgium Brewing released The Warrior, the fourth of five short films in Carbondale-based director Skip Armstrong’s series Of Souls + Water profiling a series of athletes and adventurers whose lives revolve around water in different ways. We’ve been following the series…
Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will get a special treat tonight, when National CineMedia brings two episodes of the classic series (complete with newly polished special effects) to the big screen, including the United Artists Denver Pavilions 15. That’s the good news. The less good news is the episodes…
Now in its fourth year, the Cinema Q Festival at the Denver FilmCenter showcases the many sides of GLBTQ film, with movies that capture everything from social-justice issues to stunningly accurate portrayals of everyday queer life. More than a dozen films, handpicked by programming director Keith Garcia, will be shown…
Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception as it is of Nolan’s superhero saga, now swollen into a trilogy…
One of out every five professional baseball players in the U.S. comes from the Dominican Republic. Take a second with that stat. Here’s another: Every big-league team runs a baseball academy on the island. Unless you follow baseball, you probably had little idea how important signing young Dominican players is…
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…
Not to knock films as fantastic as Rachel Getting Married, The Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, but there’s something wilder — or at least more directly stimulating and pure — about director Jonathan Demme’s live-performance docs. The 68-year-old auteur immortalized a Talking Heads show in Stop Making Sense,…
For four seasons, Breaking Bad has chronicled the journey of Walter White from “Mr Chips to Scarface,” as creator Vince Gilligan puts it. The end of the last season saw White taking out his number one adversary in spectacular fashion, marking the beginning of the final phase of his transformation…
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…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern-Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s six-year-old (also Wallis’s age during filming) protagonist and narrator,…
Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary — and not just those about religious longing and “spirituality,” its ostensible subjects, but about how deep the genre that gave us Borat and Morgan Spurlock’s spotty oeuvre can go. Kumaré is essentially the…
Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, Goodbye First Love, begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a highly emotional high school girl in love, is fifteen, and tracks her through her mid-twenties as she’s establishing a career. We first follow Camille through her all-consuming romance with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a…
From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to play-acting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…
The first film from emigré director Pawel Pawlikowski since 2004’s dreamy My Summer of Love, this thoroughly odd and brooding psycho-puzzle trains in on Ethan Hawke’s displaced American writer-academic, arrived in Paris to see his ex-wife and young daughter despite a restraining order, a recent hospital stay and a history…
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…
1979. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what’s past is irretrievably past. Manhattan’s $39 million take…
The only heavy-metal band in Iraq. A charter school in the most diverse square mile in America. A letter written by a Maine mayor asking Somalis to keep out. Those are the subjects of three of the six documentaries to be screened at the three-day 2012 Refugees In Focus Film…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
