Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is less Sidney Lumet’s comeback than his resurrection. Three years after being presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the 83-year-old director comes forth with a violent family melodrama that is his strongest movie in at least two decades. Robustly directed from Kelly Masterson’s bear-trap screenplay…
Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I’ll wager writer-director Zach Helm has been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old “toy impresario”…
Show of hands: Has anyone not heard of Guitar Hero at this point? You sir, in the back row clutching the Ratt cassette — you’re the only one? All right, pal, here’s your recap: Guitar Hero is the most popular music-based game ever made. It comes with a plastic guitar…
The Princess Bride: 20th Anniversary Edition(MGM)As far as anniversary-edition DVDs go, The Princess Bride is crushingly disappointing: no Rob Reiner commentary track, no outtakes, no making-of doc, no nothing, save for a lousy game and a few short interviews with Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, and a few…
The Addams Family: The Complete Series (MGM) Amazing Grace (Fox) Annie Duke’s Texas Hold’em Supercourse (Big Vision) Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Criterion Collection (Criterion)Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition (Sony) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Seventh Season (Warner Bros.) It’s a Wonderful Life: 2-Disc Collector’s Set (Paramount) Man…
After you’ve finished your dinner and listened to the usual pre-show stuff about sponsors and visiting groups, out of the corner of your eye you see an old man shlumping around the stage, checking furniture, fiddling with props. Minutes go by without much more happening, and the audience continues to…
By 8 p.m., the place is jammed. Some in the audience look as young as high-schoolers, while others seem to be college students; there are couples, gay and straight, and a scattering of older folk. People greet each other and make plans for post-theater drinks. But they quiet down once…
For Better. Karen has just become engaged to Max. She’s met him face-to-face only once, but they’ve conducted a three-month relationship via cell-phone conversations, texting and instant messaging. Everyone in Karen’s small circle —- sister Francine, brother-in-law Michael, old friend Stuart (who’s secretly in love with her) and Francine’s best…
Is it possible to create intelligent work with Bosco chocolate syrup? Obviously it is, since Vik Muniz has done it over and over again, in addition to other credibly contemporary creations using string, dirt, magazine ads, backhoes and skywriting airplanes. Muniz’s actual medium is photography, which he uses to record…
Even before he took over as the able director of the Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585, www.sandycarsongallery.com) a few years ago, William Biety had spent decades in the art world and had developed relationships with artists from around the country. That’s half of the backstory to Michael…
Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…
Deserting his dreams, Daniel Gold packed up his family and left the Big Apple to forge ahead to a life of new frontiers in…Arvada, Colorado. What’s worse, he just turned 35. This is Suburban, a Mile High-produced feature-length film that follows Gold as he measures his merit and his manhood…
If your plans for tonight involve playing shuffleboard with Grandma and watching Uncle Ned’s nose hairs grow, then you clearly need a well-deserved break from the yearly family Thanksgiving hell. It’s time to give the good Lord thanks for turntables, for beats, for electronic music, for your own two dancing…
When Denver-based documentary director Daniel Junge and producer Henry Ansbacher first contacted newly elected Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (who earned a masters in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1970, among other degrees), they were told their documentary crew could have two weeks of access. Two weeks…
Jacob Marley’s afterlife really sucks. First he dies. Then he’s assigned the most overzealous tormentor in all of limbo land. Now he has to redeem Ebenezer Scrooge in order to redeem himself?! What a bum deal. Although rewriting vintage tales is nothing new (think Wicked), Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol is…
Color tonight’s Mixed Bag Festival green. According to Heidi B, one of the event’s organizers (although she prefers the title “funklectic mistress”), the bash is “a mix of music, fashion and art involving a lot of people and businesses in the local Denver community.” But along with entertainment that includes…
Gimme Gimme Pillow Toast owner Janene Hurst is fascinated with the way the Japanese can make anything cute, recalling that even “a warning not to put oil down the drain had a cute little cartoon of a drop of oil with a face.” That love (combined with a desire to…
If you’re an art enthusiast who’s tired of buying overpriced work to support a guy hooked on cappuccinos and black turtlenecks, come down to the Gallery at 910 for the opening reception of the Dalit Freedom Network and North East India Project, tonight from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The exhibit…
Forget those newspaper and magazine articles you’ve been amassing year after year with information on properly roasting your bird. This holiday season, finding tips on taking your soiree up a notch is just a phone call away. The Turning Leaf Vineyard’s Thanksgiving Tips Hotline will be live from 1 to…
In 2005, Jim Schwartzkopff went to Bulgaria with Planina — a Colorado-based group of Eastern European folk musicians — to live in a village and learn the music that sounds so foreign to Western ears. Few members of the group have Eastern European heritage, so they wanted to immerse themselves…
Aurora’s stubborn little East End Arts District just may redub itself the city’s “blue-light district” with art sprouting from all the nooks and crannies along the Colfax Avenue corridor between Clinton and Geneva streets during tonight’s East End Winter Art Walk. From 5 to 9 p.m., area galleries and art…
Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions might never have seen the light of day: The second (after Touch of the Poet) in a projected cycle of plays following the New England-ensconced Harford family through history, its over-long draft was burned in the fireplace, along with other unfinished works, by the declining…
