Though based on actual 2001 events in Ohio that caused an unmanned freight train laden with toxic waste to go haywire, Unstoppable could just as well be set in the shining sun of Reagan’s 1980s. As the driverless locomotive begins gathering speed across rural Pennsylvania, bedecked with autumn leaves, it…
The glitz! The glamor! The desire for popcorn! The Starz Denver Film Festival began on Wednesday and continues through November 14, but this weekend promises to be a big one. You can get in on the action by reading Michael Roberts’s roundup of must-see movies provided by festival artistic director…
Sexy, hilarious, deep, irreverent, transcendent, unique, delightful, disturbing: The films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar are all these things and more, further buoyed by strong performances, memorable leading ladies and the director’s own inimitable imagination. And what could be more wonderful, on the brink of winter and hectic holidays-to-come, than…
In television history, perhaps no single show has ever been quite as revolutionary as The Jerry Springer Show — not that many people would see that as a good thing. All the same, over the course of its twenty-year history, Jerry Springer, along with a cast of strippers, transvestites, trailer-dwellers…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
Adapted from Valerie Plame and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoirs, the unsurprisingly validating Fair Game begins as a timeline-hopping international thriller of the countdown months to the Iraq War. Covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) and ex-ambassador husband Wilson (Sean Penn) are proverbial ships passing in the night, shuttling from Niger…
Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they’re unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle’s film — based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in…
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, in December 1974, to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…
In any marital dispute, sometimes you need a little outside input; you think you’re right, they think they’re right — you need someone objective to come in and make the call. Problem is, every time you call in somebody objective, you somehow end up pantsless, in handcuffs and covered in…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem “Howl” is essentially performative — and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening quasi-biographical movie by Oscar-winning documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Howl the movie — which, in addition to touching on Ginsberg’s early life (and successful coming out), dramatizes the poem’s…
When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by Zalachenko, her barbaric…
Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s followup to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires less shock and awe than sickening ire. The movie opens with the cautionary tale of little Iceland, an idyllic nation so stable that, as put by one local, it enjoyed “almost…
The Starz Denver Film Festival has announced its film lineup for this year’s twelve-day extravaganza, and it includes a lead-off production directed by George Hickenlooper, the mayor’s cousin, which will open the new Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. All told the fest, November 3-14, will showcase 200 movies, as well as receptions, panel…
For the most part, film trailers are pretty similar. There’s some expository dialog early on to get you oriented to what’s happening, and from there they kind of take you through the highlights of the film: The major plot points, the best one-liners, the baddest-ass explosions or fight scenes. They’re…
Landmark Theatres, which is known in Denver for its unusual or historic movie houses and its lineup of arty, foreign and independent flicks, said Tuesday that is has purchased the AMC Olde Town 14, a fifteen-year-old mainstream multiplex in Arvada. The addition of the Old Town 14 – effective this…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off: In Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has been in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of the cornrowed…
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. Gone is the Kansas-patrician enunciation and smartly tailored Depression-era trousers; as Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who…
A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void unfolds in four major parts. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing American in Tokyo with an unusually close relationship to his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), and…
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest: Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich and Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss) can spruce up any pulp. As far as comic-book adaptations go, though, Red is a little closer to the bright side of…
archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…
