A quasi-documentary portrait of young non-actors striking poses, walking around Boston, hanging out and playing or listening to music, Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a giddy and cannily frugal avant-musical. Beginning when Chazelle, now 25, was an undergraduate at Harvard, and evolving over a period…
The gang’s all here — well, minus Angelina and plus the new and terrifying, droopy-eyed Snooki part two, Deena — and after a stint in Miami, they’re back at the actual Jersey Shore. Thank God…
When you call your local government office and ask whether they are covering up a dragon population in the sewers, the usual response is an auto-reply. Greeley, faced with only slightly less outlandish accusations, has taken a more proactive route by fielding citizen concerns in a View-style talk show on…
Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns on stage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox Garrett Hedlund) until…
Generously bankrolled (then shelved) by an imperiled Weinstein Company and peopled with Oscar nominees, it’s tempting to call All Good Things an upscale version of straight-to-cable True Crime crap — only that makes it sound more entertaining than it actually is. The fiction feature debut of Andrew Jarecki, director of…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice this year, is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan…
When Johnathan McFarlane and his partner Tim DeMasters created the Festivus Film Festival four years ago, they had trouble attracting audiences to all of the screenings at the Oriental and Bug theaters. Since then, the event has picked up buzz and grown its budget. The 2011 festival later this month…
In this day and age of reality shows being devoted to every imaginable social phenomenon (recall, if you will, TV Lands’s The Cougar), it was only a matter of time before one got devoted to the “fag hag” — although the Sundance Channel’s series goes with the considerably more PC…
Many of my favorite films of the year are still awaiting wider release, so although this top-ten list wraps up my 2010, it can also serve as a guide to your 2011. My number-one film, in fact, sneaks into New York just three days before the year ends: The Strange…
Since we’re a heartbeat away from being sick to death of this month’s crop of Oscar-seeking masterpieces, we’ve decided to cast a quick glance forward to the ten 2011 films we’re excited to see. We’ve seen some of the below, and make no promises for the others, but, as ever,…
Wimmin power retrofitted as holiday heart-stirrer, Made in Dagenham recounts the real-life 1968 strike for equal pay by the 187 distaff machinists at the Ford plant twelve miles outside London. These unwitting soixante-huitards in Mary Quant hot pants and five-story bouffants are led by Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins), forced to…
Sold — and bought — as the year’s most “intelligent” blockbuster while actually baldly insulting its audience’s intelligence, Inception both conquered the 2010 zeitgeist and helped define it. It was merely the biggest rendition of the year’s most prevalent movie theme: How do you know that what you think is…
Marc Brandenburg. The latest German artist to be introduced to local audiences by Denver Art Museum director Christoph Heinrich is Marc Brandenburg, a Berlin native. The artist is the subject of a handsome solo, Marc Brandenburg: Deutch-Amerikanishe Freundschaft, installed on level three of the Hamilton Building. Brandenburg came up with…
The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…
Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen Brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush…
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza for the brothers Weinstein, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story — shy young prince helped by irascible wizard to break…
Isca Greenfield-Sanders. An up-and-coming New York art star is the subject of a beautiful solo, Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Light Leaks, in the David & Laura Merage Foundation Gallery on the first floor of MCA Denver. The exhibit has been curated by Nora Burnett Abrams, who has also done an accompanying catalogue…
Based on his own series of popular-on-the-Internet short films, Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale creates something of a new origin story for Santa Claus — or, rather, re-introduces with dark glee some of the original pagan myths that have long been glossed over by the market…
Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, also the devil in Disney’s mega-million-dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when Tron: Legacy…
It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. Premiering at Sundance in January 2009, the movie was a near-casualty of nervous-nellie U.S. Distributors — more comfortable with innocuous gay genres like the homosexual weepie or the martyr…
Ania Gola-Kumor and Andrew Speer. The tiny Sandra Phillips Gallery has shoehorned in two solos, both highlighting longtime Denver painters. The first is Abstraction 2010: Ania Gola-Kumor, featuring the recent work of a Polish-born artist who’s been exhibiting in Denver for decades. The paintings here display her signature style, in…
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York resident, was beaten outside a bar so badly by four men that he incurred a brain injury and…
