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…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’s fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in…
The Drop, the richly textured, beautifully acted film collaboration between Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) and novelist-turned-screenwriter Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), takes place in the present, but its heart lies in the noirish past of both movies and literature. In that shadowy realm, tough guys are endlessly quotable, and…
Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut has such a strong Jacques Demy influence that he might have called it The Young Girl of Glasgow. The Belle & Sebastian singer began God Help the Girl as a 2009 song cycle that follows the troubled Eve as she transmutes her anguish into sparkling pop…
The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…
Married women over thirty, here’s a pitch for a movie: My Dinner With Idris. You never thought it would happen to you, but one rainy night when your handsome and successful but distracted husband who doesn’t appreciate you is out of town, Idris Elba (The Wire, Mandela: Long Walk to…
This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.” Ninety minutes later, Smith responded: “Not me. Been hacked. Proud to be bi-curious, not brave enough to commit.” But the Internet already knew that…
What’s fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle, he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
