Still and silent, Jerry Lewis slumps there like old furniture in the lifeless house in which the first half of Daniel Noah’s coming-of-old-age drama Max Rose molders. The film is a fiction, a tidy and improbable one, but these scenes have documentary power. Lewis’ Max Rose, recently bereaved, sits and…
Horror has in recent years been so informed by found footage, smartphones and Skype that a trend toward folklore was probably inevitable. Far from trying to capture the moment, arthouse movies like The Babadook, It Follows and now Demon aspire to a kind of timelessness — what was old has…
What happens when a director takes his own life before he’s able to see his work open in theaters? In the case of Marcin Wrona and Demon, his mesmerizing Polish art-horror film, Olga Szymanska, Wrona’s producing partner and wife, has pressed on. She has traveled with the film, watching the…
“They should have sent a poet,” says Jodie Foster’s teary-eyed astronaut as she gazes upon the glory of space in Contact. It took nearly 20 years, but Terrence Malick has taken it upon himself to answer that call with Voyage of Time. Not every line rhymes, and some privilege sound…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts…
Set aside your visions of histrionic, paranoid fireworks. Oliver Stone’s whistleblower biopic Snowden finds the director in an unusually somber and controlled mood, perhaps because of the introverted, awkward nature of Edward Snowden himself. The former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, who in 2013 exposed the U.S. government’s…
Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities — New York, L.A., Chicago — it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people…
What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle…
According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing made $17 million last year — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar is likely most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but…
The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth airs Sundays on Showtime In filmmaking, an assembly cut is when recent dailies are strung together in rough narrative order to create the first, very raw draft of the movie. Though it by no means lacks polish or editorial intent, Showtime’s…
The first wave of frightful programming has just been announced for 2016’s sole local horror film festival survivor, the Telluride Horror Show, which takes place October 14 through 16. And it’s a bloody array of gems just waiting to be mined in the eerie mountain town. “Our first batch represents…
This week, our critics boldly reviewed a new Spock-doc, Clint Eastwood gave us a hero’s happy ending with Sully and our Trump-induced daydreams about moving to Norway slowly faded in In Order of Disappearance. Here is every new film that’s just opened in Denver, plus one bonus ongoing film that you must…
Some filmmakers tell great stories. Jason Halprin chooses not to. In films he’ll show Saturday night at Cinema Contra, he refuses to dictate to audiences how or what they should feel or think. The 38-year-old experimental filmmaker grew up in Pueblo. In high school, he seeped himself in the writings…
Before The Eric Andre Show came along, I always thought acting like a complete lunatic on television was mostly a white-people thing. As a culture, African-Americans generally frown upon the idea of being unabashedly clownish for the masses — black folks call it “showing your ass.” All those years of…
The Bachelor stands erect as the vanguard of heterosexual romance competitions. Bachelor in Paradise (BIP), whose third season concludes this week, is the sunburnt, daydrunk cousin of the ABC franchise. Set in the Ewok Village on the Planet Endor (the perfect place to fall in love), the summertime distraction stars…
We should be tired of wondering why Scandinavians are so fascinated with runaway crime — it’s obviously because they have so little of it. Set in Chicago or Bangkok or Juarez, vicious bloodletting might play like wallpaper, but it comes off as almost surreal, and a little gimmicky, when framed…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
Leonard Nimoy’s 1975 memoir I Am Not Spock stirred fan outrage: How dare the actor, who was indeed Spock in the original Star Trek series, publicly dismiss his beloved half-human, half-Vulcan alter ego? According to Adam Nimoy, Leonard’s son and the director of the heartwarming but uninventive documentary For the…
Colorado has long offered its scenery to movies, and now thousands of lucky locals will get a chance to star in one. Casting directors are hosting an open casting call for Netflix’s adaptation of the Kent Haruf novel “Our Souls at Night.” Starring Robert Redford (!) and Jane Fonda (!), the…
“I don’t have any answers,” Krzysztof Kieslowski once said, “but [I] do know how to pose questions.” Not an uncommon stance for an artist, certainly, but perhaps surprising for one who made a massive, 10-part miniseries based on the Ten Commandments. Later, trying to explain why he and screenwriter Krzysztof…
Starting with 1985’s No End, composer Zbigniew Preisner served as one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s closest collaborators — he worked on all of the director’s films until Kieslowski’s death in 1996, with several of their collaborations actually revolving around the world of music. (The duo even created a fake Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer,…
Since Colorado is a lot less purple this time around, we probably won’t be seeing the plethora of political ads that we have in election years past. That means a lot more room for the usual slate of the usual advertising suspects here in the Mile High City, for better…
