Tonight at the world-famous Stanley Hotel, the Stanley Film Festival will kick off its second year with Alexandre O. Philippe’s look at zombie culture, Doc of the Dead. [Disclosure: I appear in Doc of the Dead.] Sunday, the fest closes with the horror comedy What We Do in the Shadows,…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, convinced his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin in favor of a life of solitude, labor, and the triumphing of their…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Liza Johnson’s proudly frustrating Hateship Loveship is a film you’ll long to like. As middle-aged virgin Johanna, buttoned-up, buttoned-lipped Kristen Wiig seems to have landed in the Midwest from Mars — she could be The Maid Who Fell to Earth. In real life, Johanna would be wearing mom jeans and…
With more than ten million players worldwide, a twenty-year history and a tournament circuit that awards hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the top players, it’s fair to say that Magic: The Gathering is a juggernaut in the gaming industry. Despite that, it’s never garnered the same kind of…
The Berningers are a talented family: Tom Berninger is a filmmaker, and when his brother Matt, a member of the Brooklyn-based band The National, asked him to go on tour as a roadie, he obliged. Tom needed a job and some direction, and his brother’s request inadvertently offered both. Tom…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca and a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden-god perfection…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies are today. Is that going to…
Today, it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America, the triumph of rhythm over melody — the whirligig boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as the ice cream…
On April 26, filmmakers across the city are invited to take part in One Day in Denver. Novice camera-phone auteurs and skilled movie-makers alike will be capturing their unique perspectives on Denver and then submitting the footage to the multi-faceted documentary project. The project is a spin-off of One Day…
As editor of Found Magazine and a contributor to This American Life, Davy Rothbart has devoted himself to mining humor and pathos from the lives of strangers. When he learned about the Medora Hornets, a high school basketball team suffering through a nasty losing streak in a factory-gutted Heartland community,…
Now that HBO’s magnificent Game of Thrones is back, Sunday nights just became appointment viewing again. That’s great news unless your free HBO just expired, or your ex-roommate finally changed his HBO Go password or you’re not sure you can stand watching alone knowing that the show is probably just…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’s ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…
As its subtitle suggests, one reason that Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor. “I don’t do quagmires,” Donald Rumsfeld said in a…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Known to hip-hop heads and vinyl connoisseurs as Peanut Butter Wolf, Chris Manak is a DJ and producer who founded the influential underground label Stones Throw Records. The new documentary Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton tells the story of this nearly two-decade-old Los Angeles record label by exploring Wolf’s personal…
From HAL to the Terminator, robots in fiction play the part of the bad guy more often than not. Here in the real world, though, robots do some good work, and very little evil. You can get a taste of some of that good work this Sunday, April 13 at…
Jane Wells has devoted a decade to documenting human rights abuses throughout the world. She served as producer on The Devil Came on Horseback, a chronicle of the genocide in Darfur, and most recently directed the feature documentary Tricked, about sex trafficking in the United States. While working on the…
Several years ago, when Adán De La Garza and Christina Battle moved to Denver from cities with vibrant media arts communities, they sought out the same thing here. They did not find it. As video artists, they craved an artistic network, a local scene where they could bounce off ideas…
