In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a forty-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his sixty-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
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…
Director Joshua Marston demonstrated his ability to sustain almost unbearable dramatic tension in his debut feature film, Maria Full of Grace. His sophomore effort, The Forgiveness of Blood, illustrates an impressive deepening of that skill. Working from a script co-written by Andamion Murataj and with a cast of non-professional actors…
If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’s astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Being Flynn is an adaptation of Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which explored the author’s pivotal experience working at the Boston homeless shelter where his down-and-out dad, Jonathan, was a frequent guest. In the movie, Paul Dano and Robert…
Although Roger Ebert’s health problems prevent him from participating in the World Affairs Conference, the annual intellectual orgy that’s coming to Boulder from April 9 through April 13, the film critic’s interruptus program is still a featured attraction — and is now named after him. This year’s film? Tinker Tailor…
CREEP! is a movie about the making of a movie whose biggest star is a phallic monster made out of a rug. The monster is from outer space and it’s hungry. Oh, and its mouth? It looks like a vagina. The CREEP! crew, including Colorado Springs-based director Pete Schuermann, launched…
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 I said “Eskimo hip-hop crime tale,” would that send you running to the nearest sunny beach? Shot on location in far northern Alaska with a native cast and writer/director (Andrew Okpeaha MacLean), On the Ice is a marvel of concentrated, classical storytelling. The flat, snowy landscape strips away all…
The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high-schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 — one year after the network premiered — and ran until 1991, launching the career of Johnny Depp (who cameos here along with former castmate Holly Robinson Peete). As a sign of…
It’s obvious that Jason Segel has a face for comedy. He’s got a lumpy, sad-sack mug with a dozen inflections to register disappointment, confusion and self-doubt. But as the basement-dwelling hero in the Duplass brothers’ new quest movie, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Segel works his entire posture for laughs…
Last night on Project Runway All Stars, the challenge for the four remaining designers was to create a ready-to-wear outfit for designer and guest judge Nanette Lepore’s line that was “irresistible, feminine and timeless.” The winning design would be featured on the Nanette Lepore label, and profits from its sale…
AB EX. Several Denver art venues are presenting shows to salute the opening this past fall of the Clyfford Still Museum, with most featuring displays anchored by abstracts. A stunningly beautiful example of this is AB EX: Positions and Dispositions, at the capacious Robischon Gallery. The exhibit comprises five discrete…
Director-screenwriter Tran Anh Hung crams Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood into two and a half hours that offer barely a hint of the beloved 1987 cult novel’s true flavor. Not completely surprising given its elusive, ostensibly soap-operatic narrative: Toru Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama), a teenage college student in 1967 Tokyo, struggles with…
The Oscar-nominated animated musical Chico & Rita opens with a jaw-dropping swoop over modern-day Cuba, a well-grimed and bustling island of densely packed buildings that, here, is immaculately detailed and tinted just so as to make it beam even in squalor. Chico & Rita deserves credit for being the rare…
The foundations of Silent House are laid atop La Casa Muda, a nil-budget 2010 Uruguayan horror film that enjoyed an afterlife in international film festivals. It is not surprising that La Casa Muda was hastily snapped up for an English-language remake, for the concept is the sort of low-overhead, trend-conscious…
In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion on the bedside table of Jason (Adam Scott) marks him as a non-believer. His doubt also extends to conjugal matters, for he is unconvinced that married parents could ever be happy. Sharing…
Alison Greenberg was a producer for Saving Face and is manager of foundation and donor relations for the Denver Film Society. She wrote this first-person account of her trip to the Oscars with the crew of Saving Face, a documentary which won the Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short. BY…
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 Turin Horse not excepted, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, a comedy, is the most startlingly apocalyptic film of the year. As in their Adult Swim Awesome Show, the abiding aesthetic is free-associative channel-surfing, owing something to the public-access mash-ups of TV Carnage. (The attrition of this is significantly…
Holocaust culture has proven to be essentially infinite: Nearly seventy years since the end of World War II, and untold stories of decimation and survival are still hitting the mainstream, with no light at the end of the tunnel. Agnieszka Holland’s new film, In Darkness, opens a scab perhaps only…
News that Disney plans to film a remake of The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network) as the Ranger, in Colorado bucks the trend of filmmakers abandoning the state for cheaper locales — a trend lawmakers are…
