“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” runs the old cliché and the rather uninspired starting point for The Lunchbox, a slow-building, pleasingly low-key romantic dramedy set in Mumbai. Making his feature-length debut as writer and director, Ritesh Batra throws some emotional and logistical complications at the…
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…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that, yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations. That endurance isn’t…
The fourth annual Women + Film Voices Film Festival opens tonight at the Sie FilmCenter with a diverse array of documentaries, comedies, features and short films all centered on women. This fest has grown in both scope and attendance over its run at the Sie, becoming known as a showcase…
Few filmmakers have pushed the limits of cinema as forcefully as the late Stan Brakhage. His hundreds of films forged a cinematic language that has dominated the experimental media world since the 1950s. Brakhage work is not the easiest to watch. Some films, such as Window Water Baby Moving, use…
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…
Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and the rise of a reich without so much…
Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race-car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated twenty-year, twenty-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in London;…
Ah, the Romanians: Sometimes it seems like no one else is bothering to make movies for grownups anymore. With Child’s Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute-bourgeois life cracks and opens wide. Classically, we’ve got a character study under pressure, with Luminita Gheorghiu…
A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalogue boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic-film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us, “If…
When Alison Klayman began filming artist and activist Ai Weiwei for a short introduction to be included with one of his exhibitions, the filmmaker had no idea it would become the beginning of a feature documentary about the controversial Chinese figure. But after shooting the initial footage, she kept filming…
The past ten years have made it apparent that there is no more room in hell, because everywhere you look, the dead are walking the earth. Zombies are a genuine pop-cultural phenomenon, starring in cable TV’s most popular show, sitting at the center of tentpole film franchises and appearing in…
The most notorious haunted hotel in the world, the Stanley Hotel, inspiration for The Shining, will host the second annual Stanley Film Festival, April 24-27. Organized by the Denver Film Society, the festival fits right into the historic hotel, with a theme — presented by NBC Universal’s Chiller TV –…
Bored Japanese businessmen started the air-sex trend, says Bryan Poyser, director of the raunchy, heartbreaking romantic comedy, Love and Air Sex, which opens at the SIE FilmCenter on Friday, March 7, for a weeklong run. Air sex is the erotic equivalent of air guitar. Pornographic mimes boasting filthy stage names…
Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage a…
Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…
The latest chin-out probe into the mutual-lockjaw Israeli-Palestinian scenario from Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, zippy melodrama Omar immediately homes in on an athletic Arab twenty-something (Adam Bakri) scaling the West Bank wall and shrugging off gunfire in order to both visit his swooningly adorable girlfriend (Leem Lubany) and meet…
Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown on screen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in…
