Films to watch for in 2011

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,…

Made in Dagenham recalls the ’68 strike for equal pay

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…

The ten best movies of 2010

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…

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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…

In the new True Grit, Jeff Bridges makes a better Rooster than John Wayne

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…

The King’s Speech humanizes and pokes fun at the House of Windsor

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…

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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…

Flick Pick: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

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…

Tron: Legacy delights the eye, baffles the brain

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…

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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…

Jeff Malmberg’s Malwencol mystifies

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…

Black Swan is all about penetration, blood and psychosis

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…

Tiny Furniture satirizes BJs and bourgeois bohemia in New York

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…

Your guide to this year’s Christmas movie crop

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…

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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…

Vision continues the proto-feminist canonization of Blessed Hildegard von Bingen

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…

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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…

My Dog Tulip reveals the sacred relationship between pet and owner

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…

Stripped: Aguilera’s voice can’t save Burlesque

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…