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…
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…
