Steve McQueen’s first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008’s Hunger, it’s a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender’s imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
The word “disabled” continues to shed meaning this week as many of the biggest names in adaptive sports are in Breckenridge for the Disabled Sports USA Hartford Ski Spectacular, an annual winter sports festival that brings hundreds of athletes and aspiring athletes to Colorado for adaptive ski and snowboard lessons,…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
That this film was originally titled Goethe! should give you a sense of how much silly sturm und drang boosterism awaits. A biopic more fiction than fact, Young Goethe in Love opens in 1772, when the 23-year-old aspiring poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) flunks his bar…
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1974 spy novel generally regarded as the writer’s finest, is predicated on a pair of enigmatic personalities: the colorless bureaucratic master-spook George Smiley and the double agent the Soviets have planted near the top of British intelligence whom Smiley must unmask. Although…
Flea almost cries. Twice. There’s your four-word summation of The Other F Word, a half-poignant, half-absurd documentary on punk-rocker dads, self-described as “a coming-of-middle-age story” that thrills to the sight of, say, Rancid’s Lars Frederiksen, who looks as though a tattoo parlor and a Claire’s fell on him simultaneously, sauntering…
Before writing The Descendants, and before indie-film-world-big-deal-director Alexander Payne turned her novel into a George Clooney movie, Kaui Hart Hemmings worked at Westword, selling classified ads. In 1999, right out of Colorado College, the Hawaii native got her first job with us. “Had no idea what the hell to do…
The sports movie is rarely versatile: an outsider, or group of outsiders (wrong race, wrong gender, wrong species), have uncanny talent in their field, but the old guard (typically, white, old men), don’t like the change the new person represents. So the rebels have to use their talent to blow…
Lawrence Dai will be watching Julie & Julia for the 365th time at 8 p.m. tonight at the Jones, as part of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s quirky Off-Center series. In addition to the screening, there will be free beer and unelaborated-upon shenanigans involving onions; tickets are $10. Julie &…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
Fellow anthemic NPR darlings Arcade Fire and Radiohead might fiercely divide public opinion, but there aren’t a lot of Sigur Rós haters: People either love the Icelandic post-rock band or are content to let their ethereal sounds fade into the background. It follows that there probably aren’t going to be…
Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is something of a comeback for the Finnish filmmaker. His warmhearted comedy of underdog working-class solidarity, made with a mixed Finnish-French-Senegalese cast in the French port city Le Havre, was the most warmly received movie — at least by the press — shown last May in…
Eating, more or less, is the hallmark of the holidays (not to mention a cornerstone of the e-card industry) — Thanksgiving, in particular. So, whether your family-time is a drunken-uncle disaster, a Leave it to Beaver affair or something in between, at least you have some turkey, gravy and mashed…
Chuck Close. In the last few years, the Loveland Museum and Gallery has stepped up its game by presenting the work of famous artists. And the beat goes on with Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. Close first came to the fore in the 1970s with hyper-realist…
Desperately trying to appeal to not just the Gen X’ers who grew up with Kermit, but also the tykes who’ve never even heard of Jim Henson, The Muppets has none of the easy confidence of the original TV show or movie. The reboot is largely the labor of love of…
The first thing you see in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is a tight close-up of Kirsten Dunst’s face. Behind her, slow as molasses, birds are dropping from the sky. Brueghel’s “The Flight of Icarus” turns leisurely to ash; a passage from Tristan und Isolde swells on the soundtrack as lightning…
Martin Scorsese’s first foray into big-budget family filmmaking — as well as his inaugural effort in 3-D — Hugo is a personal statement disguised as a sellout. Based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated kids’ book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo centers on its title character, played by Asa Butterfield,…
According to the Department of Defense, members of the American military committed suicide at the rate of one every 36 hours between 2005 and 2010. Ten years into the war in the Middle East, with troops officially set to exit Iraq in January, the problem of service members returning home…
Chuck Close. In the last few years, the Loveland Museum and Gallery has stepped up its game by presenting the work of famous artists. And the beat goes on with Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. Close first came to the fore in the 1970s with hyper-realist…
Director Danfung Dennis’s Hell And Back Again seeks to document the personal experience of war with extreme and sustained intimacy. The nightmare-vivid combat footage Dennis shot over the so-called Summer of Decision in 2009, while he was embedded with a Marine battalion behind enemy lines in southern Afghanistan, is only…
As life-or-death dramedy, The Descendants poses several important questions: Why has it taken Alexander Payne seven years to follow up on his critically beloved, box-office boffo, merlot-squelching Sideways? And what has blunted this gifted writer-director’s edge? Payne topped his debut feature, the provocatively obnoxious abortion comedy Citizen Ruth (1996), with…
