Terry Gilliam is a gifted, ambitious filmmaker who, sadly, may now be more famous for being misunderstood and underfunded than he is for actually making movies. The Zero Theorem isn’t likely to reverse that equation. In this half-squirrely, half-torpid sci-fi adventure, Christoph Waltz, with a shaved head and a face…
Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…
In 2010, The Social Network fictionalized the dramatic building-up and falling-out around Facebook’s founding. Four years later, the documentary Print the Legend, a Netflix original, needs no fictional filter. The filmmakers assume, rightly for the most part, that viewers will be invested in the origin story and power struggles at…
You might think the world of experimental film is actually filled with experiments. But the genre’s series of tropes are often beaten to death by one generation after another. Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films, Bruce Conner’s found footage remixes and Kenneth Anger’s surrealist narratives have influenced generations of filmmakers, some of…
Almost every city has some sort of microcinema — a small-scale, do-it-yourself movie screening series showcasing experimental, oddball, archival and underground films and videos. But Denver needs more of them, says Anthony Buchanan, so he’s launching Cinema Contra, his own wandering microcinema that will be doing monthly screenings in different…
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima – © 2014 – Universal PicturesNeeson in A Walk Among the Tombstones.Special guest Inkoo Kang, film critic at TheWrap and news editor at Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood blog, joins Alan Scherstuhl of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of the LAWeekly to discuss a variety of…
In 1995, after the death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage, Cheryl Strayed looked for comfort by dabbling in sex and heroin. When that only made her problems worse, Strayed embarked on an ambitious journey to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Coast Trail. In 2012 Strayed…
Kevin Smith is a bright guy who over the years has become a little too taken with his own persona — it’s the filmmaker’s equivalent of getting high on your own supply. No matter how awkwardly pontifical or ill-shapen his movies have gotten in the past ten years — including…
They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, A Walk…
The beginning of David Mackenzie’s U.K. prison drama, Starred Up, might make you wonder if you’ll survive to the end: We see a kid with a hard-eyed, shut-down face being matriculated at a new jail. Apparently, he’s outgrown his old one, and so he’s been “starred up,” or prematurely transferred…
At the Mirror. Ron Otsuka, who has overseen the Asian-art department at the Denver Art Museum for more than four decades, is set to step down at the end of the year. His swan-song exhibit, on view now in the cozy Martin and McCormack Gallery on level two in the…
When the International Film Series launched in 1941, there were no debates about the merits of film verses digital distribution. There were no videos, no DVDs, no Blu-rays and no digital files. Film was film. You could touch it and scratch it and cut it and paint it and what…
Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema is everything the size-obsessed movie industry is not. The screen is small. The theater fits no more than four. The longest film lasts seven minutes. Instead of projecting the latest digital files, Gravey shows movies with an old Super 8 mm, home projector. Forgoing booming…
Jim Havey’s soon-to-be-finished feature documentary, The Great Divide, aims to tell the tangled story of water in Colorado — a subject as vast as the state and the eight states that Colorado supplies water to. He’s looking at the acequias (ditch irrigation systems) in the San Luis Valley, the export…
Sender Films took seven years to make Valley Uprising, its joyful, wistful history of the climbing counterculture of Yosemite. And as filmmaker Peter Mortimer told the audience at the feature’s premiere in Boulder last night, they used every last hour of that time. “[Partner Nick Rosen] and I haven’t seen…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio loves the media and the media loves him. So does the Republican political establishment. So does the Tea Party. Through his six terms in office, the 82-year-old sheriff has perfected the media stunt and used public relation campaigns to keep journalists on his side –…
Even in the most conservative areas, theater provides a home for the misfits, the oddballs, the outcasts and the rebels. In his new documentary, Skanks, David McMahon follows a group of performers as they prepare to perform Billy Ray Brewton’s raunchy drag musical Skanks in a One Horse Town, in…
While the first Colorado ski areas won’t be opening for another month, locals know that snowboarding season actually starts in September, with the early onslaught of video premieres to stoke the fire. And, for the second year in a row, you can see almost all of them in one place…
Today is my last day in Venice, which always makes me blue. Yesterday morning, on the way to my final screening, a tourist with an Eastern European accent I couldn’t quite identify stopped me a block or so from the sad and shuttered Hotel des Bains and asked me if…
Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent that he wanted to do a drama. It took a while. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable…
“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…
Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis). This is only the second presentation to open at the Rule Gallery since the untimely death of Robin Rule late last year. It was important to Rule that the gallery continue, so three longtime associates — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hilary Morris — are carrying…
