A favorite pastime of critics and serious film-goers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden age of…
Early this month, we learned that Guy Fieri was casting for the second season of his new TV show, and we realized we forgot something: Guy has a new TV show! Guy has a new TV show much of the time, but it’s not like us to simply ignore a…
Citizen Kane will screen in 35-millimeter print on the big screen at the Sie Film Center tomorrow in conjunction with a discussion of Cinematic States: Stories We Tell, the American Dreamlife, and How to Understand Everything, a book by Northern Irish author and film critic Gareth Higgins, who explores American…
Amidst the blizzard of film-lovers blanketing Park City, Utah for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Ernie Quiroz, the Denver Film Society’s programming manager, watched sixteen movies in just three days, an enviable sprint for most seasoned couch-potatoes. More enviable, he did it for work. Quiroz returned to Denver Monday after…
When Lamberto Bava’s splatter classic Demons screens this Saturday, January 25 at the Alamo Drafthouse, it isn’t just a rare chance to see this obscure gem on the big screen. The film also marks the debut of Channel Z, Keith Garcia’s new cult-film series that picks up where his excellent…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
You can say this for the Disney teen machine: They sure know how to pick ’em. Vanessa Hudgens was seventeen when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, and her elders Justin…
Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi solidifies his status as one of cinema’s finest living dramatists with The Past, a superb followup to 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation that again situates audiences amid interpersonal, familial and household crises. Working from a script that incisively plumbs a thicket of logistical and emotional complications, Farhadi’s…
Jillian Schlesinger’s Maidentrip condenses fourteen-year-old Laura Dekker’s quest to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world down to a breezy eighty minutes, which isn’t to say it’s all killer, no filler. Though certainly inspirational, the film could hardly be called probing: The range of emotions exhibited by…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
For Robert Redford, Sundance’s opening day was a bummer. He woke up to learn that the Academy had snubbed him for a (deserved) Best Actor nod for the sparse yachting drama All Is Lost, and had to spend his typically triumphant morning press conference swatting down questions about being sad…
The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…
Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…
© Courtesy of Sundance InstituteSixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first…
© Beth Dubber, Courtesy of Sundance InstituteKristen Stewart in Camp X-Ray.Kristen Stewart spent five Twilight films getting rescued by werewolves and vampires. Consider Camp X-Ray her rebuttal to a half-decade of playing damsels in distress. As Guantanamo guard Private Cole, Stewart is punched, bloodied, and spat on — and that’s…
In the dark about the history of movies? Get a clue from critic Howie Movshovitz, who’ll be teaching Film 102, a four-class series that starts tonight at the Sie FilmCenter. Film 102 will look at the four major elements of cinema: color, genre, sound and melodrama. The first session, on…
American Mustang, which had its local premiere in November at the Denver International Film Festival, is galloping back into town for an extended run that starts today and continues through January 24 at UA Denver West Village Stadium 12, 14225 West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, just in time for the…
Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…
A tale of love complicated — if not thwarted — by prior responsibilities, intractable barriers and the rigid high-society norms that frustrate its Victorian characters’ attempts to live as they so desperately want, The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front…
Can it be true that the apple-cheeked Midwestern evangelicals who send their money, their teenagers and their last-century sexual mores to Uganda genuinely see no link between their fervently anti-gay, anti-condom preaching and that country’s movement to make homosexuality not just illegal, but punishable by death? The toothsome young Pentecostals…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
