Colorado-grown Design OnScreen, a non-profit working for the preservation of modern architecture through film, has been hard at work. Just back from the Biennale Architettura in Venice in late August, the organization is now hosting its fourth annual Architectural + Design Film Series, a month of movies celebrating several eras,…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Spike Lee returns to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of his most famous works — including his celebrated debut, Do the Right Thing — with Red Hook Summer, and an early, sustained single take, tracking his protagonists as they navigate a courtyard in the projects, suggests that this trip home has reinvigorated…
Remember back when Bridesmaids was released, and Manohla Dargis referred to it as “unexpectedly funny”? It’s amazing what still survives the editorial gauntlet at the New York Times; it’s like the Whig Intelligencer-Tribune over there. And then a couple of months ago, podcast host Adam Carolla cast his douchey feelings…
Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy union in…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an unseasonably mild August afternoon in the Astoria section of Queens, where later tonight he will preview his latest film for an invited audience at the…
The story goes that while filming in Tunisia in the summer of 1980, Steven Spielberg avoided the dysentery that afflicted most of the cast and crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark by holing up in his hotel room with a suitcase full of SpaghettiOs. Like most studio-approved behind-the-scenes errata,…
Forge Motion Pictures, NRS Films, and New Belgium Brewing premiered The Elder this week, the final film in director Skip Armstrong’s five-part Of Souls + Water series. Armstrong calls the film “a dreamy, contemplative, non-literal piece” about Rob Elliot, 68, a Grand Canyon river guide with more than 200 trips…
Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer, the debut feature film from Bizjack FlemCo, features zombies, bowling and a seriously weird twist, all wrapped up in a gore-splattered, over-the-top sensibility that should be familiar to fans of Troma. The locally made film will get its proper Denver debut at the Denver Indie…
In The Revenant, a soldier dies in Iraq, only to awaken back home as a member of the living dead. But this particular undead guy isn’t quite a vampire, and he isn’t quite a zombie — he’s a revenant, a restless spirit returned in corporeal form. From that relatively straightforward…
Continental Drift. To create Continental Drift, MCA Denver curator Nora Burnett Abrams and Aspen Art Museum curator Jacob Proctor looked at the work of more than 300 Colorado artists who had submitted portfolios. Abrams and Proctor then winnowed the hundreds of submitters down to a mere twenty and scheduled them…
Social media’s role in the would-be Iranian revolution of 2009 is by this point much hyped, but no one has yet covered it quite like Ali Samadi Ahadi in The Green Wave. In both form and content, the filmmaker refuses the orthodox, eschewing the official record in favor of narrated…
Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s fourth film as writer-director, is a sequel to her 2007 2 Days in Paris. Itself a spinoff of sorts, Paris piggybacked on the popularity of 2004’s justly…
After its Sundance premiere, Compliance might be infamous as the film that inspired a woman to cry out “Rape is not entertainment!” However, writer/director Craig Zobel is not Daniel Tosh. Judging from the film itself, which keeps its final sexual assault entirely off-screen, Zobel seems to agree with that heckler/critic…
A winter storm of ski and snowboard video premiere parties will pummel Denver and Boulder over the next two months, as local theaters roll out the white carpet for VIPs (Very Important Pros), local/national/international filmmakers and snow-dancing revelers. We’ve put together the most comprehensive guide we could muster — with…
Zachary Byron Helm pushes the boundaries of horror in his upcoming film, Death Hearse on Satan’s Titty Highway, which he’s filming right here, right now in Englewood. And it should be a wild ride. See also: – Q&A: Artist Daniel Crosier of Mother Mind Studios – Ten weird movie references…
Though its sister theater, the Mayan, seems to grab all the attention as an historical treasure, Landmark’s Esquire Theatre is actually a little bit older — though you wouldn’t know it from its moderne facade. But while the Mayan, which opened in 1930, survives — with tweaks — as the…
A trio of filmmakers from Carbondale won three of the four festival awards at the Chamonix Adventure Festival over the weekend in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France: Tyler Stableford won the Jury Prize for Shattered, his portrait of alpinist Steve House (see it in full after the jump); Skip Armstrong and Forge Motion…
“I have always been against this idea of the ‘clash of cultures,'” Marjane Satrapi says. “It’s the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve ever heard.” That’s apparent from her films and graphic novels, which bridge worlds. Born in Iran, Satrapi emigrated to Europe with her family when she was a teenager…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
It might be true that we hurt the ones we love the most, but André Téchiné’s epic neo-family drama depicts offenses—attempted murder, mid-funeral beat downs, sex videos for Daddy—that no relation should have to countenance. Alain Resnais mainstay André Dussollier plays Francis, a best-selling mystery writer who travels to Venice…
