Nowhere Boy, English art star Sam Taylor-Wood’s oddly straightforward biopic about the juvenile John Lennon, concludes, as well it should, with the singer’s haunting, incantatory primal scream, “Mother.” But instead of tying a bow on the film’s portrait of familial abandonment, Lennon’s guttural, air-cleaving quaver puts everything that precedes it…
Kept afloat by a great cast, Woody Allen’s latest foray into the perverse follies of mankind begins with a statutory quote from Macbeth about the futility of it all. But like so much of Allen’s work over the past decade, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is more Bergman-lite…
It was only a matter of time before South Park took on The Jersey Shore — actually, it’s pretty surprising it didn’t come sooner. Featuring a real-life cast of possibly the most vapid, melodramatic, self-aggrandizing assholes on earth (they’re sweet in their own dumb way, too — we get it),…
Denver’s a great place for fans of the big five of genre film (that’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror, exploitation and cult), as every week we get a generous helping of selections to choose from. As usual, we’re rounding up your options for the weekend to come and the following week, and…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
Horses make lousy protagonists, what with their inability to speak, emote, or do much of anything other than run or stand around. No surprise, then, that Secretariat employs its subject as merely a vehicle for a human-victory-over-adversity story, which, in this based-on-real-events case, involves owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) triumphing…
A film seemingly designed to get every New York City honors student face-punched at college, It’s Kind of a Funny Story chronicles a privileged Brooklyn high-schooler’s super-cool institutionalized mental-health break. Hot for his best friend’s girlfriend, stressed out over an application to a prestigious summer school and audaciously neglectful of…
A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary, Seth Gordon’s anthology Freakonomics pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book of pop math and hands them over to famous doc filmmakers to make their own. Gordon (King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts…
Denver’s a great place for fans of the big five of genre film (that’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror, exploitation and cult), as every week we get a generous helping of selections to choose from. As usual, we’re rounding up your options for the weekend to come and the following week, and…
Despite valiant efforts to resuscitate it, Colorado’s movie biz has been more or less flat-lining ever since those purty pictures of downtown in the title sequence of Dynasty went off the air. Still, at least we can take solace in the fact we have some heavy hitters in the TV…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it into Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a painted Western China desert, some time in…
The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and Tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie — it’s his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let’s talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,…
Women are catty. Every time they go out, it’s like they’re all like, “Girl, don’t even,” and then the other one’s like “WTF did you just say to me?” and then they ineffectually slap each other until they comically fall into a pool. Even when women appear to be cool…
A Christmas movie in September typically means either throwaway scheduling or advance Oscar positioning. And, for a while, Lovely, Still, a modest little picture from novice writer-director Nik Fackler, seems to offer little more than the slightly dismaying sight of two great old actors striving to do right by a…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor, the tale of the Fox and the Gekko (Charlie Sheen’s upstart broker Bud, Michael Douglas’s Wall Street player Gordon). Only the buccaneer charisma of Douglas’s signature role obscured the “Clean business, clean soul” moral…
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
As Westword’s Latest Word blogger-extraordinaire Michael Roberts pointed out, the premiere episode of La La’s Full Court Wedding was boring, despite the fact that title of the show sounds a little porn-y, like some horribly horrible sex act you’d read about on UrbanDictionary.com. “Gosh, I’m kind of nervous for the…
Lord love them, but little kids don’t have the most refined senses of humor — it’s a fact that they will watch anything as long as it’s animated and someone takes a projectile to the balls every once in a while. Which is all fine and good, but kids don’t…
Bitch-slaps and blood-oozing bullet wounds became less frequent in Colorado last week as filming of locally shot Motor Vixens wrapped up. Joe DuRand, who plays the character known only as Walker, calls the movie “a hot rod full of wicked women on a hell-ride to Nowheresville.” And Kelly Hart calls…
