Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
Sherlock Holmes is the most popular character in English literature, and the one most frequently portrayed in film history. More than seventy actors have played him in over 200 films and radio and TV series. Sometimes it seems that any actor in need of a hit just throws on an…
Adventurer, survivalist and outdoor guru Bear Grylls is the star of Running Wild with Bear Grylls, now in its second season with NBC. On each episode, viewers watch Grylls take A-list celebrities, TV stars and even a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Drew Brees, into untamed and untouched areas around the globe for a…
Where will you be at 4:29 p.m. on October 21, 2015? To legions of Back to the Future fans all over globe, that’s the exact time and date when Doc Brown and Marty McFly zoom into the future in Back to the Future II, the first sequel in the cult-favorite…
Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour, and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…
Completing a trifecta of recent cinema suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never makes the same movie twice, toggling from Pixelvision experiment…
Why would a world-renowned philosopher come to Denver to talk at a free screening of an old film noir? “When I talk about German philosophers, people tend to tune out. When I talk about movies, I get a much better reception,” says Robert Pippin, a Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche expert at…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay, and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to explain to his mom, whom he’ll be living with…
We’re in the spooky season, full of haunted houses, zombie crawls, scary movies — and next year could be even spookier. The announcement trailer for Friday the 13th: The Game was just released, and it hypes what looks like the scariest survival horror game yet, coming next fall. The asymmetrical multiplayer…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
A lot of ink (most of it negative) has been spilled discussing the cinematic oeuvre of Tyler Perry, whose gospel-infused morality tales leave critics cold but do so well with audiences that they’ve afforded Perry the chance to be an auteur — a creative who has absolute control over every…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…
Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank’s long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer. Commissioned by the boogie-woogie piano bluesman Leon Russell, who is more this roaming doc’s fitful center of gravity than its star, A…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name, playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Five years ago, the Denver Film Society moved into a new theater space at the Lowenstein Arts & Culture Complex on East Colfax. After settling in to the space’s nooks and crannies, the Sie FilmCenter is finally ready for its closeup, and hosting a fundraiser to celebrate its status as…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine — Sorkin’s…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Denver filmgoers, grab your boards for some cool waters headed our way as the 38th Denver Film Festival, produced by the Denver Film Society, has announced the first wave of programming for the event, this November 4 – 15. The festival has never announced this much programming ahead of its…
Forty years ago, the big crime news in this wide-lapel cowtown had nothing to do with six-year-old pageant queens, high-school shooters or feuding gangbangers. The obsession of the moment was the 1975 murder of businessman Hal Levine, and the prosecution of Michael Borelli, a supposedly mobbed-up former New York police…
Our nation’s movie boogeymen have been around for a long time. We’ve seen some of the classic movie monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy — so many times they just aren’t scary any more; with no element of surprise, the bogeymen are now our buddies. We’ve…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of a real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course,…
