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…
Collaboration is the new competition, and eight of Colorado’s coolest local skate shops and skateboard brands are banding together in an unprecedented partnership to release Malfunction, a new video from filmmakers Brandon Greer, Corey Miller, and Travis La featuring skaters James Batcheller, Dan Hunter, Scott Johnson, Mike Marks and Garrett…
Colorado-based filmmaker Daniel Junge won an Oscar tonight for Saving Face, the short documentary film that follows a Pakistani plastic surgeon dedicated to performing reconstructive surgery on women who’ve been attacked with acid. Read an interview with Junge about Saving Face…
This isn’t Daniel Junge’s first trip to the Oscars. The Colorado-based filmmaker was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010 for his documentary The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner; this time he’s nominated in the Documentary Short category for Saving Face, a film that follows a Pakistani plastic surgeon…
It was World War III last night onProject Runway All Stars as the designers competed to see who could create the best national flag-inspired outfit. Each contestant was to take on a nation that represented a “major world region,” but some of the countries wound up looking somewhat obscure…
Red carpet appearances by designer gown-donning stars are just as much a part of the Academy Awards spectacle as the Oscars themselves. In advance of this coming weekend’s 84th annual ceremony, Denver FilmCenter’s Reel Social Club is celebrating this marriage of fashion and film with it’s Seam To Screen event…
The Mizel Arts and Culture Center will launch the sixteenth annual Jewish Film Festival today. “This is our most far-reaching event,” says Lisa Korsen, marketing director for MACC. “It’s where we get our most diverse audience, patrons who may not be Jewish but are interested in the culture. We have…
Hollywood’s biggest night is coming up on Sunday, and in honor of that most hallowed of cinematic traditions, we’ve compiled a list of the five best places to watch the Oscars in style…
With over fifty films screening, the Colorado Environmental Film Festival is seeking to inspire audiences into action. The fest runs Thursday through Saturday in Golden at the American Mountaineering Center with flicks about environmental issues from organic farming to energy conservation. “I hope that people will walk away from this…
