MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles is gorgeous and lunkheaded, gory and hilarious, sometimes awful and sometimes full of awe. It’s also quite welcome: Just as Terry Brooks tore the pompousness out of Tolkien with his pulpy, brick-thick Shannara novels, the series – executive produced by Jon Favreau – shows your Game…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment, accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
A sure-bet time-waster with a clutch of big laughs? A 100-minute brief on Hollywood’s lack of imagination? Grist for future essays about how quickly the idea of Ice “Fuck tha Police” Cube playing a gun-happy hero cop became routine? Whatever you make of Ride Along 2 beforehand is certain to…
The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…
After an extensive nationwide search — and a year that saw vibrant branding for the Sie FilmCenter, as well as one of the smoothest Denver Film Festivals on record — the Denver Film Society yesterday announced the appointment of a new executive director, Andrew Rodgers. In March the former journalist…
What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of computers and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself instead of…
The new year is upon us and with it comes twelve more months ready to be filled to the brim with films, be they classic or new, fancy or just famous. We continue to be lucky to host such robust and varied cinematic possibilities in our city and so, after…
As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic. —Michael…
As we ring in another year in movie-going — and as the industry prepares for its annual spasm of awards and accolades — it seems an apt time to look ahead. Here are ten films you won’t want to miss in 2016. 1. The Invitation (Directed by Karyn Kusama) The…
Is there a movie you watch every New Year’s Eve? For many years, local TV station KWGN played Casablanca on New Year’s Eve, and it’s still a perennial favorite with Denverites (as well as sentimentalists everywhere). In Russia, people like to watch the 1976 romantic comedy The Irony of Fate at this time…
Why do we love A Christmas Carol so much that we see it again and again, year after year? It’s an annual pageant of redemption that gives us a villain we get to boo, and a reformed soul we get to cheer. Scrooge stands in for our guilty and regretful…
Singing elves. Dancing snowmen. The awkward beauties of stop-motion animation. Yuletides threatened by mad professors, insane dictators, giant buzzards and Arab stereotypes. Welcome to the world of Rankin/Bass, a company that took the shiny, pop-culture Christmas ball and ran with it, creating a demented body of video work that will…
More traumatizing events happen during the Yuletide season than during any other period. This time of year, you can’t throw a brick without hitting a holiday well-wisher — and believe me, we’ve tried. The crushing rush of Christmas is so culturally pervasive that you can’t escape the traditional holiday entertainments that…
The dismal march through Christmas kitsch continues. While we value love, kindness, faith and redemption, when you fetishize any values and work them over for their commercial value, they ossify. They sour. They become shorthand for real feelings. Then they take their place entirely. That’s when they become despicable. That’s…
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s sweet nectarine of a jazz standard “Easy Living” figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes’s Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Even though the lyrics speak of contentment — “Living for you is easy living/It’s easy to…
Here’s a challenge. Gather some friends, pour some drinks and announce to everyone the premise of Daddy’s Home, the new family comedy about dads competing to be pater superior. It won’t take long: Will Ferrell is a doting shlemiel of a stepdad to suburban moppets whose biological father, played by…
Here it is folks, a cinematic advent calendar of sorts for this holiday season. Our local repertory houses — the Sie FilmCenter and the Alamo Drafthouse, along with a handful of other movie houses — are about to go all H.A.M. for you and your Christmas spirit. So, we’ve gathered…
How good was 2015 for movies? My first draft of a top ten was a staggering top thirty. I had to make some agonizing cuts and punt by giving documentaries their own sidebar — this year, they’ve earned it. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Watch every one…
Concussion isn’t much of a movie, but it’s a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players. As it happens, the human brain isn’t supposed to whip against the skull like a…
Here’s to Quentin Tarantino’s cussed perversity. The Hateful Eight, his intimate, suspenseful Western splatter-horror comedy, has been shot at great expense in the long-gone 70mm format, but the movie itself is set almost entirely in cramped interiors. He’s hired Ennio Morricone to score the thing, but don’t expect any rousing…
Fans have been lining up at theaters across the country since Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered. But Zach Putnam was not among them. He’s been waiting for this movie, but is willing to wait still longer for the reviews. Because in the interim, he had time to create this…
Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight opens this week, the latest chapter in a long tradition of Westerns filmed in Colorado. The state’s epic scenery has made this a destination for filmmakers for more than a century, and many of them made Westerns. From film’s beginnings to the early 1960s, Westerns were…
