Denver’s a great place for fans of the big five of genre film (that’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror, exploitation and cult), as every week we get a generous helping of selections to choose from. As usual, we’re rounding up your options for the weekend to come and the following week, and…
Despite valiant efforts to resuscitate it, Colorado’s movie biz has been more or less flat-lining ever since those purty pictures of downtown in the title sequence of Dynasty went off the air. Still, at least we can take solace in the fact we have some heavy hitters in the TV…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it into Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a painted Western China desert, some time in…
The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and Tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie — it’s his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let’s talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,…
Women are catty. Every time they go out, it’s like they’re all like, “Girl, don’t even,” and then the other one’s like “WTF did you just say to me?” and then they ineffectually slap each other until they comically fall into a pool. Even when women appear to be cool…
A Christmas movie in September typically means either throwaway scheduling or advance Oscar positioning. And, for a while, Lovely, Still, a modest little picture from novice writer-director Nik Fackler, seems to offer little more than the slightly dismaying sight of two great old actors striving to do right by a…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor, the tale of the Fox and the Gekko (Charlie Sheen’s upstart broker Bud, Michael Douglas’s Wall Street player Gordon). Only the buccaneer charisma of Douglas’s signature role obscured the “Clean business, clean soul” moral…
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
As Westword’s Latest Word blogger-extraordinaire Michael Roberts pointed out, the premiere episode of La La’s Full Court Wedding was boring, despite the fact that title of the show sounds a little porn-y, like some horribly horrible sex act you’d read about on UrbanDictionary.com. “Gosh, I’m kind of nervous for the…
Lord love them, but little kids don’t have the most refined senses of humor — it’s a fact that they will watch anything as long as it’s animated and someone takes a projectile to the balls every once in a while. Which is all fine and good, but kids don’t…
Bitch-slaps and blood-oozing bullet wounds became less frequent in Colorado last week as filming of locally shot Motor Vixens wrapped up. Joe DuRand, who plays the character known only as Walker, calls the movie “a hot rod full of wicked women on a hell-ride to Nowheresville.” And Kelly Hart calls…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
Opening with a deeply sincere “I don’t give a fuck!” Austin filmmaker Ben Steinbauer’s investigative doc Winnebago Man sets out to prove the contrary. Steinbauer’s mission is to find Jack Rebney, the hitherto-anonymous pitchman whose fabulously profane tantrums during the course of making a 1989 RV infomercial — amid a…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple-A ball, director-star Ben Affleck models a full line of warmup suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stickup man, the brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that…
Big Game Restaurant will screen a classic, beer-infused flick every night this week to honor the goodness that is beer and to celebrate Denver Beer Fest, which runs through September 19. Tonight’s movie — which Big Game will show on its thirty-foot HDTV, is Beerfest from 2006 (look below for…
Denver’s a great place for fans of the big five of genre film (that’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror, exploitation and cult), as every week we get a generous helping of selections to choose from. As usual, we’re rounding up your options for the weekend to come and the following week, and…
Abstracts. Summer is typically the time for group shows, and this year the William Havu Gallery presented two of them. First was Landscapes, a survey of the many artists in Havu’s stable who do representational work. Up now is Abstracts. Gallery director Bill Havu has some of the state’s top…
Amir Bar-Lev’s assiduous, furious documentary on the Army’s craven coverup of the death by friendly fire of former NFLer Pat Tillman in Afghanistan in 2004 — and the exploitation of his corpse for recruitment purposes — is a withering assessment of U.S. military culture. Unlike recent Afghan war doc Restrepo,…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature, but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon hardly seems like a debut, perhaps because it’s based on a scenario Maoz had been replaying in his head…
