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…
An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando Valley. Florida transplant Jane (Dree Hemingway) is employed by one of the area’s main engines of commerce, breaking into the XXX industry and cheerfully working adult-movie trade shows. When not…
Early in Waiting for Lightning, skateboarder Greg Hunt utters a surprising truth as he marvels at the giant ramp Danny Way has put together in order to jump the Great Wall of China: “They would never let anyone build something like that here.” It’s a throwaway remark that’s also an…
Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’s mere existence might shock many Americans. “There are four Universal Soldier movies?” those shocked Americans would say. They might also be taken aback by the bracing violence that marks the film from stem to stern: the gangland-style execution…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Holy Motors, the first feature-length film from Leos Carax since 1999, stars Denis Lavant, the simian, sinewy actor who played the lead in Carax’s first three movies, as a character named Oscar who inhabits nearly a dozen different personas over the course of a day. Steered…
An adaptation of George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly anatomizes a self-policing underground economy of junkies, killers and administrators to indict a present-day mainstream world — the world into which the film is being released by Harvey Weinstein, heralded by misleadingly generic TV adverts…
Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins with a sack of fat connecting chin to neck) walks the red carpet at the premiere of his 1959 chase film, North by Northwest. “You’re sixty years old!” shouts a reporter to the corpulent master of suspense, then nearing his…
Born and raised in Denver, Heather Dalton has long nurtured affection for one of the city’s proudest cultural alumni: Neal Cassady, the larger-than-life literary macho-muse who inspired the character of Dean Moriarty, hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. For the past several years, Dalton, a musician, filmmaker and producer…
Snowboarding season is getting into full swing up in the mountains, with resorts opening by the day (Steamboat and Eldora opened their 50th anniversary seasons this week, and Beaver Creek and Crested Butte are also now spinning chairs in time for Thanksgiving), but you wouldn’t know it down here in…
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…
If you recently had a close encounter with the howling demon known as Hurricane Sandy, you might have a renewed belief in global warming. If not, consider yourself lucky, then see Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski’s beautiful yet sobering documentary about the world’s rapidly melting ice caps. His guide is…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of-Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals, but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high-seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing emotion,…
When Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) tells the new man in her life that she likes “indie” movies, it’s both a declaration of identity and a dare. The man, Brian (David Oyelowo), a bus driver who has politely but persistently pursued Ruby after driving her home from her overnight nursing shift at…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s…
“I started filming in Vail before there were any lifts,” remembers Gypsum-based filmmaker Roger Cotton Brown, who was the principal cinematographer at Vail from 1962, when the resort opened, until 1989 and has continued filming skiing and snowboarding in the Vail Valley and around Colorado ever since. “I first went…
Woody Allen has been known to suggest that, in directing a good movie, much of the battle lies in casting. Were that entirely true, the Philip Seymour Hoffman-, Catherine Keener- and Christopher Walken-starring A Late Quartet would be phenomenal. As it is, the film about a New York City string…
If you Google the phrase “Danzig shopping for cat supplies,” you’ll find links to phone-cam shots of former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig crossing a grocery-store parking lot while wearing a Danzig T-shirt and carrying Fresh Step. He’s a striking figure, and, with his pale, vampiric aspect, totally incongruent with the…
There’s an un-fun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses, with a kind of unlovable, Al Gore-ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton movie: Past glories don’t justify contemporary relevance. The year 2012 marks fifty years since…
