The 40th annual Denver Film Festival opened triumphantly on November 1 with the Colorado debut of Lady Bird, only to stumble as a result of the mediocre Big Night offering Submission and a handful of other high-profile misses. But the last full week of the fest, which concluded on Sunday night, November 12, succeeded more often than it failed.
Despite the many troubling trends in our media culture, the movies’ response to the Iraq War has been (gasp) surprisingly admirable. Since the mid-2000s, a steady stream of films have artfully addressed war’s aftermath and the homefront — from Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah, to Grace is Gone…
… In Three Billboards, where livid, grieving mother Mildred (Frances McDormand) taunts the local police for not solving her daughter’s rape and murder (by being burned to death) from nine months prior, McDonagh has taken on a situation that demands we take it seriously.
The Colorado Symphony, led by its ambitious new music director, Brett Mitchell, will be performing the score of Star Wars: A New Hope, alongside two fortieth anniversary screenings of the film, in March 2018.
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights a selection for November 10, 11 and 12: Quality Time, AlphaGo and Easy.
Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling …
“This is one of my favorite films in the festival,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey about Under the Tree. “It’s an Icelandic and Danish coproduction by the same producer who made Rams, which won as our best feature film in 2015.”
Hello Again tasks its cast with impassioned miming of a panoply of sex acts, the singers conjugating each other like verbs in foreign language class
When I first saw Brett Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, I was shocked that the film somehow matched the rollicking, mercurial energy of its subject, producer Robert Evans. Morgen reimagined the use of archival footage and voiceover, and the style he pioneered has now been mimicked…
One year, back in the early 1990s, an uncle of mine didn’t show up to our family Christmas. I was only 10 and didn’t understand his sudden departure and why nobody would speak of it. A year later, I was at his funeral. He was a playwright and actor in…
Over six episodes crafted with the rich complexity of the novel, “celebrated murderess” Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), tells her own story, Scheherazade-style, to a doctor (Edward Holcroft) with the power to arrange for her pardon
For Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey, the November 8 screening of Ramen Heads is an opportunity to learn from a miscalculation he made last year.
Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May, probably says more about the times we’re living in than any other film you’re likely to see this year. And yet the beauty of the movie is that everybody will have their own ideas about what,…
“I wish I could live through something,” the title character laments to her mother in the opening scene of writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Played with comical intensity by Saoirse Ronan, 17-year-old Lady Bird — née Christine — is too young to realize that she is inescapably living through something,…
Diane Kruger, who was named Best Actress at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for her work throughout In the Fade, “plays a German woman who’s married to a Turkish man,” Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey goes on. “One day, she’s dropping their son at their office, and as she’s leaving later that day, a bomb goes off and it kills her husband and their little boy.”
The fortieth annual Denver Film Festival got off to a fine start with Lady Bird, an opening night flick well worth discovering. Since then, the event’s attendance has been impressive despite a lack of star power on par with Emma Stone’s appearance for La La Land last year and the mixed quality of the six movies I caught during the fest’s first weekend. Note that a Q&A with costar Kyra Sedgwick on November 3 barely mentioned Submission, the DFF’s centerpiece presentation at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for which she was ostensibly on-hand, and no one seemed to care.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, BPM (Beats Per Minute), French director Robin Campillo’s stylized, moving drama of AIDS activism and love, sometimes feels like several films at once. It follows the activities of ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s, and for much…
Jane arrives in theaters on October 20 On Sept. 11, 2001, renowned primatologist and environmental advocate Jane Goodall was in New York on business. She had planned to catch a flight out to visit a high school to give a talk on how we can find a reason to hope…
From what little we’re given of Kurt in the trailers, Gibson seems to be playing a caricature of his own darker side, a tiresomely inappropriate, unapologetic button-pusher
“Thelma is a film from Norway that’s actually the country’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey. “It’s an interesting film of the type that you don’t necessarily find in film festivals all that often. It’s sort of a supernatural, paranormal thriller, but a really intriguing one.”
Yes, it’s hard to imagine wanting to watch 11/8/16 today. The film, a sweeping survey documentary created and produced by Jeff Deutchman, follows 16 Americans from across the country on election day of 2016: a Sikh New York cabdriver, a “Dreamer” in San Jose, a Massachusetts dad in a MAGA…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights a selections for November 3, 4 and 5: Have a Nice Day, Vigilante and Strad Style.
