Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, and to top the Hollywood A-list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in…
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors, and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year old in Nowheresville whose…
David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…
At tonight’s installment of the Denver Film Society’s Women + Film series, PeaceJam’s Dawn Engle will be the woman, and The Mayan Renaissance will be the film. This fastidious and lovely history of Mayan civilization and culture fast-forwards into the present, as it is seen by Nobel laureate (and PeaceJam…
Blockbuster, now a subsidy of Dish Network, yesterday officially opened its international headquarters in Colorado — specifically, at the Meridian International Office Park in Douglas County. The move comes with the possibility of $2.5 million in Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits from the Colorado Economic Development Commission, since Blockbuster promises…
Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man such a gift. In telling the tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American balladeer from Detroit who cut a…
It’s a hard world to be different in,” says Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) to her Pinterest/vision-board child Timothy (CJ Adams) while trying to explain why he must cover up the leaves that sprout on his legs. “Lots of people hate anything that’s different.” That hammer-to-nail, nutshelled life lesson is one…
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…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
The Colorado Independent Women in Film program, an annual three-day event at the Bug Theatre that showcases the work of women in the Colorado film industry, opens tomorrow. Packed, a short documentary that follows evacuees of Boulder’s Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010 and describes the possessions they collected on their…
Last weekend, more than fifty teams of local filmmakers wrote, shot and edited entire film in 48 hours. Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the film they made had to be in a genre selected at random, and incorporate a line of dialogue and prop that…
This deft, atmospheric Errol Morris-style tour through the phenomenon that is “serial imposter” Frédéric Bourdin homes in on one brief episode from the man’s berserk career: the period in 1997 when the 23-year-old Frenchman convinced a Texas family that he was their disappeared teenage son. This is already well-trod territory,…
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books: They’ve been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality. The only big-ass popcorn franchise of the past decade to have not been spawned on computers, the series up…
The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: “War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no rules.” The Texas billionaire/private-campaign-financing pioneer dropped this truism not during his historic third-party run for the presidency in 1992, but in the midst of his far less successful 1996 campaign…
In mid-August, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far landed on the red planet. The Curiosity Rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of life, study its climate and geology, and collect data that might help future manned missions. To get in the spirit, we’ve combed…
For many, especially black people who see in her a mockery of our own grandmothers, Tyler Perry’s Madea is little more than a mammy — an insult to the matriarchal community figure that Perry claims to celebrate. And unforgivably, when compared to Flip Wilson’s Geraldine or even Martin Lawrence’s Big…
“I’ll just tell you straight out: Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin admits. This is really something coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
“My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It’s not contagious—I mean, it’s contagious, but don’t worry: Grownups don’t catch it. It’s called mouth-foot-and-butt disease or something.” Julie Delpy materializes on the patio of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont on a wave of nervous energy. Hair pinned up away from her…
Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact of life before anyone could know how it would affect the human body and brain on an extended timeline. One way to look at writer/director Craig Zobel’s second feature, Compliance—a pot-stirrer…
Just because it made loads of money, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and features a three-titted mutant doesn’t mean Total Recall isn’t ruggedly individualistic art. Just look at its outsider pedigree: Total Recall was loosely based on a 1966 short story from the flushed mind of Philip K. Dick, produced by the…
In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama I (which didn’t screen in time for our deadline)—Whitney Houston’s posthumous film appearance and her return to movies after a fifteen-year absence—we look back at the handful of celluloid performances by the woman once known as “the Voice.” Houston’s pipes…
One of the most interesting things about Cosmopolis, writer/director David Cronenberg’s extraordinary adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel by the same name, is that it’s based on the first script Cronenberg has both written and shot since 1999’s eXistenZ. Additionally, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis marks the first time he has adapted…
