Mountainfilm in Telluride closed out its 34th annual festival on Monday with an awards ceremony in Telluride’s Town Park, recognizing six films for various prizes and naming the nonprofit organization Peaceful Uprising as winner of the 2012 Moving Mountains Prize. The award — and $12,000 — goes to a nonprofit…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
If women were in charge, there’d be peace in the Middle East — or at least that’s what’s suggested by Where Do We Go Now?, the second film from Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki. Like her 2007 debut, Caramel, it’s driven by a deep faith in female friendship, though…
If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow White might…
Achieving something far weirder and more resonant than the genre pastiche it initially seems to reach for, Beyond the Black Rainbow satisfies on practically every level — provided you allow its narcotic pace, lysergic visuals and throbbing soundtrack to tickle your cortex into a contained frenzy instead of lulling you…
Mountainfilm in Telluride is celebrating its 34th anniversary this weekend, through May 28, and we’re duly impressed by the the list of Colorado-based filmmakers in the mix. Here’s a preview: Telluride-based filmmaker Beth Gage is the current Board President of Mountainfilm in Telluride and is bringing her second documentary, Bidder…
Can’t you just picture this restaurant as a stop in some epic road-trip movie? Or maybe as the site of an awkwardly tense lunch scene in a Coen brothers film? A new website called Shoot Colorado is cataloging the state’s quirky attractions, sweeping vistas and abandoned ghost towns so that…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
This entry in the “hot young opposites attract over the course of one long night” genre takes place at Scotland’s muddy summer counterpart to Coachella, T in the Park. Adam (Luke Treadaway), the skinny-jeans’d frontman of a famous Brooklyn electro duo, gets in a squabble with Morello (Natalia Tena), a…
Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their release and have as little memory of the experience as if I’d been mind-wiped with one of those “neuralyzing” flash…
Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel deals in binding family ties and the sterility of the comfortable classes. The New Yorker’s second feature, shot in 16mm black and white, the film is an offhand, picturesque road-trip movie with a mock-epic Northeastern itinerary. It’s also a cage-match brother-and-sister act, revolving around…
Derby Baby: A Story of Love, Addiction and Rink Rash, the long-awaited roller derby documentary from Denver-based filmmakers Robin Bond and Dave Wruck, will get its local premiere on June 16 at the Denver FilmCenter with screenings at 2:30, 5 and 7:30 p.m., all presented by both the Rocky Mountain…
My taste in popular culture is inherently gay. Not “gay” in a derogatory sense — I mean, “gay” as in I often find myself liking stuff only my gay dude friends like. Knowing nothing about her work, I signed on to see Kristin Chenoweth’s performance at the Ellie Caulkins Opera…
Young filmmaker Blaine Davies’s new trailer for the 2012 Crisis Skateboards team video nails the perfect mix of what everyone wants to see in a proper skate vid: It’s a combination of equal parts mind-blowing, technical, holy-shit skateboard prowess and people wrecking themselves over and over again, as if you…
It’s Colorado Rides Electric Day — who knew? Designed to ride shotgun to the World Renewable Energy Forum now at the Colorado Convention Center, the celebration includes a two-day Electric Avenue electric car expo that’s free and open to the public from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Representatives of charging…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition 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…
The non-fiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in First Position, a glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young ballet dancers striving to secure awards, scholarships and job contracts at the prestigious annual Youth America Grand Prix. Director Bess Kargman adheres to a now-familiar template in which…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years,…
In The Dictator, his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to…
Even after a committee killed HB 1006, thecivil unions bill, late yesterday, filmmaker Mike Shum holds out hope. While the documentary creator says he doesn’t usually consider himself an activist, he was particularly moved by the recent round of civil unions discussion at the legislature — and wanted to do…
Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy Father, wracked with self-doubt about his new position, on a walkabout in Rome. Back at the Vatican, the cuddly cardinals who await his return square off in a round-robin volleyball tournament. The…
It’s one of those eternal questions: Which was better, the movie or the book? You may find the answer tonight, when Cinema in the Stacks, a monthly literary film series hosted by the Aurora Central Library, kicks off for the summer. For the most part, perhaps because the library is…
