A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few…
Winner of last spring’s SXSW festival and current indie darling, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture is a comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only from evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs and iPhone porn, but from satirizing New York’s bourgeois bohemia. Newly graduated with a degree…
It’s the most wonderful cash crop of the year, this Christmas thing. And while we feel there’s been a decline in the quantity of Christmas movies lately (a political correctness issue, perhaps?), Hollywood can’t help but put out one or two cheer-baiting full-lengths annually. Not to sound cynical — we…
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…
The fifth collaboration of director Margarethe Von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa, Vision continues the proto-feminist canonization of Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (Sukowa), twelfth-century Benedictine magistra, scientist, visionary composer and literal receptor of visions. Cloistered at age eight, Hildegard grows into hardball politicking in the Holy Roman Empire as a…
Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner, you director of RoboCop 2 and some film called The Empire Strikes Back. Born in 1923, he died over the weekend at the age of 87 and left behind an oeuvre of great filmmaking — including no small number of sequels. So it makes sense…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
The antithesis of both Marley & Me cuddliness and Cesar Millan militance, J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir about his recalcitrant German shepherd, My Dog Tulip, is one of the finest, most insightful chronicles of inter-species devotion. The writer’s empathy and wit are mostly well served in Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s adaptation…
She doesn’t sing that way because she’s had it easy.” This is how Tess (Cher), the long-suffering owner of the nightclub at the center of Burlesque, defends her new star, Ali (Christina Aguilera), to the club’s jealous, deposed marquee attraction, Nikki (Kristen Bell). The same phrase could substitute as a…
Great,” sighs the wicked witch in Tangled, a CG-animation spin on the Rapunzel story, “now I’m the bad guy.” Mother Gothel, the frizzy-haired, sharp-featured enchantress with the inimitable voice of Donna Murphy, is Disney’s first villainess whose chief crime is being an underminer, and the heroine of Disney’s fiftieth animated…
As projected, the crowds came out for this weekend’s premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, to the tune of $125.1 million, the most ever for a Potter flick. That included my family’s little donation to the total weekend box-office; we caught Deathly Hallows Saturday at the…
Harry Potter is only barely trailing Star Wars as the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time, and that won’t last for long. The seventh movie in the series, which comes out tonight at midnight, is expected to do north of $100 million in revenue this weekend. We’re less than twelve…
Today is a good day for local films — like, a ridiculously good day. On top of the Adventure Film Festival starting today in Boulder and tonight’s one-time screening of the locally shot Our Good Friend, Jesus Christ, this evening marks the opening of EFPalooza, the Emerging Filmmakers Project’s four-day…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
A fascinating, deftly layered look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception, Waste Land follows celebrated New York artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he’ll work with outer Rio garbage-pickers on an ambitious art project. Ostensibly called to “give back” to the impoverished…
A teenage witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…
Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s excellent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe knowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the…
Republicans are flag-flying rubes who drive enormous pickup trucks and lap up mass-produced reality dreck like it was a case of shitty domestic beer. Democrats are effete, pasty elitists who drink tea with their pinkies up and prefer “sophisticated” TV programs nobody cares about. These are the stereotypes basically confirmed…
The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg, in Cool It. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past…
In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in a flesh-colored, diaphanous cocktail dress, its halter top and tight bodice giving way to spilling tulle. This is the kind of dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the…
You know the drill: House gets messed up, tool-lugging good guys come in and save the day. That’s the constantly replaying plot on the DIY Network’s Disaster House, where the destruction is creative, but the denouement workman-like. Still, trying to figure out how Denver techno-guerrilla marching band Itchy-O got in…
Since sometime circa the late ’90s, Conan O’Brien has been the best of the late-night talk-show hosts. While Jay Leno did jokes so tame they would’ve felt just as at-home coming from a purple cartoon dog in the middle of the afternoon, Conan’s formula continued to feel fresh and relevant…
