There is much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to…
Colorado’s movie industry has taken off in fits and starts over the last 120 years, but while boosters are always hoping that more films will be made here, some of the movies already made in this state deserve far more attention than they’ve received. Our survey continues (see the first…
It’s time to put on makeup! It’s time to dim the lights! Because it’s October and the month is full of frights! Yes, the best movie-,watching month of the year is here (if you love horror movies — and if you don’t, then…) because art houses and cinemas, movie houses…
“My greatest hope is to provide people with a completely immersive experience, enveloping them in this world,” says Desireé Holman, an interdisciplinary artist whose work has a self-described “arm of anthropology.” The California-based artist is now putting the finishing touches on her exhibit Sophont in Action that will launch the Black Cube…
The Mile High Horror Film Festival is almost here, and that means it’s time to turn out the lights and scare yourself stupid. This year’s festival offers a slate of incredible retrospective films, from “respectable” classics like The Shining to gorehound favorites like Saw. Along with the old favorites, an impressive…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
The Alamo Drafthouse was buzzing yesterday with the appearance of legendary comedian Jack Black on the red carpet, alongside Goosebumps co-stars Odeya Rush, Dylan Minnette and Ryan Lee. The film, based on the beloved ’90s kids’ horror-book series, opens in theaters October 16 — but will kick off the Mile…
At long last, Geektober is almost here! Yes, the rest of the world may know it by its traditional name, October, but geeks know the month really belongs to us. Don’t believe it? Just have a look at Denver’s lineup of great geek fun for the month and you’ll be…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
Revered American crime novelist James Ellroy is coming to Denver this weekend to kick off an exciting new film series at the Alamo Drafthouse. On Saturday, September 26, Ellroy will host a screening of Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film L.A. Confidential, which was based on Ellroy’s novel of the same name. That…
“Giallo” translates to “yellow” in Italian, plain and simple — but when the word is used to denote a particular style of literature and film, it is terrifyingly more. The giallo genre comprises a stylish thriller that generally involves a masked killer stalking women and men alike, usually with revenge…
Given the rich Latino heritage that runs through Colorado, it’s surprising that a properly programmed and produced film festival celebrating all of our diverse hermanos y hermanas took so long to appear. It wasn’t until last year that the Denver Film Society produced the first CineLatino Film Festival — and…
In the mid-twentieth century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life — and…
Colorado is photogenic, and proves it in more than a hundred films. It first posed for the camera in 1897, when James H. White and Frederick Blechynden shot short “actualities” such as Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys, and the kinetic Denver Fire Brigade, in which horse-drawn engines, careening and…
With Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner introducing themselves not just to America but the world, the stories of transgender people are beginning to find vocal and visual platforms. From This Day Forward, a documentary screening Tuesday at the Sie FilmCenter, adds a fascinating new chapter. It’s the story of…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features — which is curious, since the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a seventeenth-century folktale than a late-twentieth-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In 1980s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
When the dust finally settles on 2015, it may most likely be known as the year of Caitlyn Jenner. Amid months of rumor and speculation and a ratings-breaking Diane Sawyer interview, she left behind her role as a gold-medal clad Olympian and eventual put-upon straight man and step/father amid the…
