Glenn Close succumbs to pitfalls in Albert Nobbs

Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, co-writer and lead — brings to the screen the titular character of Albert Nobbs, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland, a role for which she won an Obie in 1982…

Project Runway All Stars already jumps the shark? Oh yes.

It’s only episode three of Project Runway All Stars, and already they’re jumping the shark by having the client for this week’s challenge be a fictional character. Not just a fictional character, but a fictional animal character. A fictional Muppet character. That’s right, the designers are making cocktail dresses for…

Haywire puts the impact back into screen violence

There’s a point in Haywire when the film’s protagonist, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), gone rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, takes a fall while scaling down a drainpipe and hits the ground with a crunch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s…

OutsideOnline.com screening Sweetgrass Productions’ ski film Solitaire tonight

Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner’s Sweetgrass Productions film Solitaire — documenting two years exploring South American backcountry terrain on a human-powered trek around Argentina, Peru, and Chilean Patagonia — was the year’s most surprising ski film, winning the Best Cinematography award at the IF3 International Ski Film Festival and earning Waggoner…

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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…

Pariah is a moving story of coming of age and coming out

The first ten minutes of Pariah — Dee Rees’s funny, moving, nuanced and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable — sharply reveal the conflicts that seventeen-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. Riding the bus back to her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home after a…

Joyful Noise is a holy hot mess of the sacred and inane

A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…

303 Boards preps to drop new Queen City skateboard video

This week Denver skate shop 303 Boards (1338 East Colfax Avenue) dropped the second teaser for its forthcoming team video Queen City, featuring Mike Marks, Matt Kehoe, Brendan Macleod, and Cody Hodge. The film, due out this spring, is the latest in a long line of videos the shop made…

The ten best exorcism movies

With the release of The Devil Inside, out Friday, the cinema gods are taking a moment to remind all of us that religion is scary — It’s all higher powers and judgments and abductions by beings of light and women turning into salt and beings of pure good offset by…

Deconstruct the films of Lars von Trier at the Thin Man

Currently in the spotlight for his latest film, Melancholia — in which life goes on in a world under the threat of total destruction — Danish director Lars von Trier peppers his movies with avant-garde visuals, misogyny, complex stories and stylized stagings. And since the release of Element of Crime…

Outrage depicts the yakuza with bemused irony

Takeshi Kitano’s latest finds the actor-director returning to the familiar terrain of the yakuza film after recent farces (Achilles and the Tortoise, Glory to the Filmmaker!) dealing with artistic endeavor. Stark and brutal, Outrage is a litany of startlingly violent set pieces filmed in Kitano’s decorous, aestheticized style, gunshots blooming…

Eleven movies to look forward to in 2012

We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…

Top ten Show and Tell posts of 2011

Depending on who you’re listening to, the world is going to end in 2012, or the world will undergo some sort of transformation. Either way it’s spiritual. What’s not spiritual, however, are these cold, hard numbers: The top ten posts on Show and Tell during 2011, which may or may…

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Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…

The bombastic War Horse is classic Spielberg

A doggedly overwrought production less felt than facile, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is an essentially uninvolving prestige adaptation. It might be perverse to accuse a tearjerker as accomplished as Spielberg of being unfeeling. But the overcalculation with which he mechanically trots out one of his most familiar tropes for what…

A Dangerous Method is both an intriguing narrative and a splendid love story

A Dangerous Method, the title of David Cronenberg’s viscerally cerebral new film, is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous science-fiction romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5000 Fathoms. Adapted by…