Are you a prudish nostalgic looking to sip some tea, nibble on crumpets and harken back to the good old days when servants were servants, aristocrats were aristocrats and monarchs bred with each other over and over and over again, holding onto their estates through thinly veiled incest? Do you…
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered” is the on-the-nose epigraph that opens Enemy, a forgivable sin in light of how gloriously enigmatic everything that follows is. Denis Villeneuve’s shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelgänger while watching a movie and mines every bit…
To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special-effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass biblical epic. The ark built by Russell Crowe’s…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage (formerly Breacher, formerly Ten), his third attempt — after the full-auto Western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in fourteen months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…
Chuckling in libraries and meeting halls since 1979, members of the Jane Austen Society of North America have been digging deep into the English novelist’s classic tales of romance amongst the British landed gentry. In advance of the March 30Alamo Drafthouse Cinema screening of the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Austen’s…
As Goldfrapp, singer Alison Goldfrapp and musician/composer Will Gregory have created a discography of breathy, synthesizer-heavy songs that carry an inherent cinematic feeling. For the duo’s sixth album, Tales of Us, Goldfrapp collaborated with Alison Goldfrapp’s real-life partner, film director Lisa Gunning, to build a series of music videos, each…
Let’s start with the ending, the closing-credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of the…
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” runs the old cliché and the rather uninspired starting point for The Lunchbox, a slow-building, pleasingly low-key romantic dramedy set in Mumbai. Making his feature-length debut as writer and director, Ritesh Batra throws some emotional and logistical complications at the…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that, yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations. That endurance isn’t…
The fourth annual Women + Film Voices Film Festival opens tonight at the Sie FilmCenter with a diverse array of documentaries, comedies, features and short films all centered on women. This fest has grown in both scope and attendance over its run at the Sie, becoming known as a showcase…
Few filmmakers have pushed the limits of cinema as forcefully as the late Stan Brakhage. His hundreds of films forged a cinematic language that has dominated the experimental media world since the 1950s. Brakhage work is not the easiest to watch. Some films, such as Window Water Baby Moving, use…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and the rise of a reich without so much…
Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race-car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated twenty-year, twenty-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in London;…
Ah, the Romanians: Sometimes it seems like no one else is bothering to make movies for grownups anymore. With Child’s Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute-bourgeois life cracks and opens wide. Classically, we’ve got a character study under pressure, with Luminita Gheorghiu…
A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalogue boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic-film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us, “If…
When Alison Klayman began filming artist and activist Ai Weiwei for a short introduction to be included with one of his exhibitions, the filmmaker had no idea it would become the beginning of a feature documentary about the controversial Chinese figure. But after shooting the initial footage, she kept filming…
The past ten years have made it apparent that there is no more room in hell, because everywhere you look, the dead are walking the earth. Zombies are a genuine pop-cultural phenomenon, starring in cable TV’s most popular show, sitting at the center of tentpole film franchises and appearing in…
