A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…
There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d’Or. Amour, Haneke’s much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed…
Being a lucky guy, I’ve only been kicked in the balls once. How did it rate on the comedy scale? Well, it was funnier than a monologue by Chelsea Handler, but not quite as hilarious as my last screening for colorectal cancer. Yet despite the fact that this act hurts…
In George A. Romero’s deeply silly 1993 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half, Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a writer whose highbrow pretensions don’t pay the bills. When Thad needs to make a quick buck, then, he seals himself into his study and grinds out a nihilistic thriller to…
David KrutaStacie Passon’s Concussion is a happy surprise.Sometimes, one film in a festival lineup can help to reveal another in sharper relief. To wit, one of the loveliest entries in Sundance 2013’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, James Ponsoldt’s deeply felt coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now, looked even better after the premiere…
Many Denver theater-goers remember Jacqueline Antaramian from her roles with the Denver Center Theatre Company. During her ten years there, she starred in Mark Harelik’s The Immigrant, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, among others, and she was a memorable Masha in Chekhov’s Three…
Rachel MorrisonMichael B. Jordan (The Wire), who’s fully up to the challenge, in Fruitvale.You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in…
In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development’s hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet.In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute’s ongoing filmmaker development labs as “our core,” noting…
“Wow. Lucky number 13, I guess? Kind of at a loss for words here,” stumbled Denver-based filmmaker Josh Berman of Level 1 Productions, accepting the prize for Best Movie last night at the 2013 Powder Awards in Park City on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. “To actually spend…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
The mandate at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, as one doctor says during Pete Nicks’s attentive vérité portrait of the place, is to admit people “just as much for their social conditions as for their medical ones.” And as the same guy wearily acknowledges, “The ER’s not the place to manage someone’s…
A chiller about two abandoned little girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much…
For the next ten days, all Hollywood eyes — and those of many a film-goer — will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the…
We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the ten top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero — an attempt at a tonal gene…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing seventeen years later, was a noted…
On Monday filmmakers Anson Fogel and Skip Armstrong of the Carbondale-based collective Forge Motion Pictures released Cascada, a new adventure short produced in partnership with NRS, the Idaho-based gear brand. The film documents a trip to the jungles of Mexico with photographer Tim Kemple and some of the world’s top…
This past weekend we fulfilled a journalistic dream, Anchorman-style, when we filmed a water-skiing squirrel named Twiggy performing at the Denver Boat Show. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny woodland creature wearing a lifejacket and being towed behind a remote-control boat in a kiddie pool in the corner…
The beach-party movie has fallen from its former pinnacle of popularity, but it still has its fans. Take writer/director Zach Clark, for instance. His latest film, Vacation!, resurrects the classic beach-party film formula, updates it for the 21st century and then twists it into weird places that Frankie and Annette…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
Although they almost certainly have plans for striking new projects that expand our understanding of what documentaries can be, Bill and Turner Ross — the co-directors, -producers, -camera operators and -troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas — could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in-New Orleans documentary…
Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
When you’re a film student, no matter how hard you try to deny it, you become a bit of a film snob. That’s how I felt when I went to see Hugo for the first time in the theater, and ten twelve-year-old girls sat in front of me. I rolled…
