In an era in which Hollywood considers destroying whole cities obligatory for blockbusters, it’s refreshing to recall a time when such fantastical demolition had a poignant significance. You can feel it in Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, now receiving a sixtieth-anniversary re-release. Honda’s miniatures are both charmingly quaint and touchingly physical (a…
Chuck Forsman. The Denver Art Museum’s curator of photography and media arts, Eric Paddock, has a special interest in photos of the American West. For Seen in Passing: Photographs by Chuck Forsman, Paddock chose works from two series by Forsman: “Western Rider” and “Walking Magpie.” Beginning in the 1970s, Forsman…
Harrison Ford has been a good soldier in the Star Wars. He did whatever was asked of him by his commanding officer, George Lucas, even when his commanding officer was wrong. Now that Ford is back in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams is running the show, Abrams’s first order of…
When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…
Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s two-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance, Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…
Everyone loves Batman. The world’s greatest detective has managed to become the world’s most popular superhero over the course of his 75-year existence, all without any actual superpowers. Along the way, his bravery, his mission and his ability to hang with the heroes who can literally throw cars around like…
When I showed up for an advance screening of Focus on the Family’s documentary, Irreplaceable, about one man’s attempt to define what makes a family, I had a knot in my stomach. I was entering hostile territory. See also: James Mhoon on Focus on the Family’s new documentary and God’s…
Does God exist and, if so, has he provided humanity with a perfect design for family structure? James Mhoon thinks so. As vice president of Content Development and Integration for the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, he leads the organization’s charge to spread the word about the importance of…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source that science has dubbed…
The vampires that walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-racking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he was a boy…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Tonight at the world-famous Stanley Hotel, the Stanley Film Festival will kick off its second year with Alexandre O. Philippe’s look at zombie culture, Doc of the Dead. [Disclosure: I appear in Doc of the Dead.] Sunday, the fest closes with the horror comedy What We Do in the Shadows,…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, convinced his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin in favor of a life of solitude, labor, and the triumphing of their…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Liza Johnson’s proudly frustrating Hateship Loveship is a film you’ll long to like. As middle-aged virgin Johanna, buttoned-up, buttoned-lipped Kristen Wiig seems to have landed in the Midwest from Mars — she could be The Maid Who Fell to Earth. In real life, Johanna would be wearing mom jeans and…
With more than ten million players worldwide, a twenty-year history and a tournament circuit that awards hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the top players, it’s fair to say that Magic: The Gathering is a juggernaut in the gaming industry. Despite that, it’s never garnered the same kind of…
The Berningers are a talented family: Tom Berninger is a filmmaker, and when his brother Matt, a member of the Brooklyn-based band The National, asked him to go on tour as a roadie, he obliged. Tom needed a job and some direction, and his brother’s request inadvertently offered both. Tom…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca and a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden-god perfection…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies are today. Is that going to…
