The 6th annual Reel Rock Film Tour kicks off on Thursday, September 15, at the Boulder Theater, featuring six of the year’s most intense climbing documentaries. This week, Boulder’s Sender Films and Reel Rock event promoter Big Up Productions released the 2011 lineup and a trailer featuring each of the…
Design for the Other 90%. This traveling exhibit from the Cooper-Hewitt in New York — the national design museum of the Smithsonian Institution — is being presented at RedLine, which is strange, as it relates more to technology than to art. Not only that, but it’s way too small for…
You know those Affliction shirts, covered in skulls, gothic lettering and tribal patterns, all cacophonous symbols of bad-ass machismo? That’s what the mixed martial arts tie-in movie Warrior is: an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fire sale of male-weepie tropes, awesome in its thoroughness. The collective dream of authentic blue-collar American grubbiness lives on…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an employee of an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like crap…
At one point in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s decades-spanning directorial debut, the actress, playing Corinne, a woman still soaked with lake water after her baptism into an evangelical sect, resembles no less a touchstone than Ronee Blakley in Robert Altman’s Nashville: slightly high hair; starchy, sexless, long tunic dress; swaying…
We generally try not to let our hipster cynicism and pessimism override us here at Show and Tell, but there’s no way around the truth of hindsight. Now that it’s September, and the official Summer movie season is over, we know: The tentpole Summer movies of 2011 sucked, and sucked…
Nobody is really a fan of Netflix’s rate increase, but if you’ve been holding off selling the children into slavery for the price hike, you might want to start hitting up Craigslist, because it’s about to hit you hard. Thankfully, you’ve probably still got a little time before your bank…
Joseph Coniff. This smart and at times extremely funny show, titled Joseph Coniff: This Is What It’s Like, highlights the efforts of an emerging conceptual artist. Coniff, who studied at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where he was a protegé of Clark “Drop City” Richert’s, is just…
The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott’s moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film’s co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto). En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge,…
A group of thirty-somethings trapped in the amber of their high-school years attempt to bone their way into adulthood in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, an ensemble sex comedy written and directed by Larry Sanders Show writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck. Technically, the orgy of the title is conceived…
It’s true that, as a kid, you generally have occasion to go to amusement parks more often, but it’s not until you are an adult that you get to go to them and drink booze — and that makes all the difference. Well, arguably the booze is just a way…
It’s no secret Denver has a love affair with film festivals, but if you’re looking to pack in a ton of films into a single night, there aren’t a whole lot of options. Thankfully, 38 Films is going down tonight at Casselman’s. It’s a collection of 38 films (duh) from…
Just over ten years ago, Golden-based mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer made history as the first blind man to make the summit on Mount Everest, then went on to complete the Seven Summits — the tallest peaks on each continent — in 2008. Weihenmayer, with the help of his friend Jeff…
Joseph Coniff. This smart and at times extremely funny show, titled Joseph Coniff: This Is What It’s Like, highlights the efforts of an emerging conceptual artist. Coniff, who studied at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where he was a protegé of Clark “Drop City” Richert’s, is just…
The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June’s Trollhunter, Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it’s neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy. Set in a sprawling London public-housing compound, the film follows a group of teenage…
In Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, a kind of upstate New York version of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski — a man out of time, blinkered enough to be living the hippie dream. In the film’s first scene, Ned is “entrapped” into selling pot at a farmers’…
Inspired by a 2008 New York Times Magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, Steve James’s commanding documentary The Interrupters, about “violence interrupters” in Chicago, who intervene in conflicts before they escalate into gunshots, unfolds as deeply reported journalism. Much like Hoop Dreams (1994), James’s in-depth examination of the athletic aspirations of…
Don’t talk shit to Steve Carell, because apparently he will slap you like a bitch. Not in a scary, Wayne-Brady-turned-evil kind of way — no, Steve Carell is way too nice for that, and also, in a weird way, he’s even scarier. Because somehow, Steve Carell is a sweet enough…
Another Victory Over the Sun. For this group show, all of the exterior light sources at MCA Denver have been covered over so that the interior is essentially dark. Organized by director Adam Lerner and assistant curator Nora Burnett Abrams, Another Victory is made up of art that’s meant to…
The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a fifty-something policeman in West Ireland, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager; he also displays a…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls and based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…
A cinematic reboot for the patron saint of 98-pound weaklings, Conan the Barbarian is both truer to the vision of its character’s creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than John Milius’s 1982 movie incarnation. Director Marcus Nispel, along with no fewer than three screenwriters, eschews the lugubrious mythmaking…
