Singing elves. Dancing snowmen. The awkward beauties of stop-motion animation. Yuletides threatened by mad professors, insane dictators, giant buzzards and Arab stereotypes. Welcome to the world of Rankin/Bass, a company that took the shiny, pop-culture Christmas ball and ran with it, creating a demented body of video work that will…
More traumatizing events happen during the Yuletide season than during any other period. This time of year, you can’t throw a brick without hitting a holiday well-wisher — and believe me, we’ve tried. The crushing rush of Christmas is so culturally pervasive that you can’t escape the traditional holiday entertainments that…
The dismal march through Christmas kitsch continues. While we value love, kindness, faith and redemption, when you fetishize any values and work them over for their commercial value, they ossify. They sour. They become shorthand for real feelings. Then they take their place entirely. That’s when they become despicable. That’s…
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s sweet nectarine of a jazz standard “Easy Living” figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes’s Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Even though the lyrics speak of contentment — “Living for you is easy living/It’s easy to…
Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting shlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…
Here it is folks, a cinematic advent calendar of sorts for this holiday season. Our local repertory houses — the Sie FilmCenter and the Alamo Drafthouse, along with a handful of other movie houses — are about to go all H.A.M. for you and your Christmas spirit. So, we’ve gathered…
How good was 2015 for movies? My first draft of a top ten was a staggering top thirty. I had to make some agonizing cuts and punt by giving documentaries their own sidebar — this year, they’ve earned it. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Watch every one…
Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. As it happens, the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate, suspenseful Western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect any rousing…
Fans have been lining up at theaters across the country since Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered. But Zach Putnam was not among them. He’s been waiting for this movie, but is willing to wait still longer for the reviews. Because in the interim, he had time to create this…
Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight opens this week, the latest chapter in a long tradition of Westerns filmed in Colorado. The state’s epic scenery has made this a destination for filmmakers for more than a century, and many of them made Westerns. From film’s beginnings to the early 1960s, Westerns were…
A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a ten-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…
Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…
Here’s a true story about a St. Louis murder that changed America. In 1837, a black freeman named Francis McIntosh stepped off a Mississippi riverboat and blundered into two white cops chasing a drunk sailor who’d called them names. They ordered McIntosh to stop the perp; when he refused, they…
George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful forked over their dollars. Then both Lucas and Hubbard mucked up their simple premise with add-ons like…
The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse, Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the world’s first sexual-reassignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script…
What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies, and then watch in horror — and a touch of self-congratualtory awe — as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise comes lessons,…
A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders’s latest (written…
Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’s documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips. It’s a smashing supplement to Truffaut’s classic study. It’s…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had helmed one of Nantucket’s…
After two long months of public voting and friendly campaigning, Coors Light just announced that the Denver Film Society’s Joanna Cintrón has been named the 2015 Coors Light Líder of the Year. The honor comes with a $25,000 grant from Coors Light that Cintrón will use to introduce a Latino…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
