Film, TV & Streaming

The Stop the Presses event at the Alamo Drafthouse, a programming series that celebrates the news in cinema through screenings of classic tales of journalism like Sweet Smell of Success and All the President’s Men has inspired a lot of conversation about the relationship between journalists and the movies that portray them. With barely enough titles to qualify as a sub-genre, movies about the news often become indelible documents of the time and place that created them, going on to win Academy Awards and inspire future generation of filmmakers and reporters alike. However, many films about the news tend to gloss over the un-cinematic tedium of the work itself, which is understandable given how much of a journalist’s life is spent sitting at a keyboard. The qualities that make a movie character dramatically compelling are often totally at odds with the qualities that make a good journalist, so when a truly entertaining movie about an admirable journalist gets made, it deserves some attention. The following list celebrates movies about journalists –both real and fictional– who live up to the highest ideals of their profession.

In 2013, love came in many forms: girl on zombie, boy on smartphone, and James Franco on — count ’em — two hot bikini babes at the same time. Sure, romantic comedies are as extinct as Oprah Winfrey’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, but audiences…

Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarves. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…

Here’s a question you never thought you’d hear Noam Chomsky answer: “What makes you happy?” That puzzler comes near the end of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated marvel of a film rigged to set your brain off like fireworks. The great linguist and activist’s easy surge…

The year’s third everything-goes-wrong-in-space flick is its second-best one, stripped of the dewy self-helpisms of its better, Gravity, and the limiting found-footage approach of its brainy/dumb lesser, Europa Report. Ruairi Robinson’s The Last Days on Mars doesn’t monkey with any of that NASA-approved, Neil deGrasse Tyson-pleasing speculative-fiction realism. Instead, it’s…

Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…

Bronx-born filmmaker Abel Ferrara considers all of his fiction films to be documentaries: What you see is what happened in the moment that it was shot. That mentality informed the making of Ms. 45, Ferrara’s characteristically complex 1981 rape-revenge drama. In the film, a mute teenager (Zoë Lund) copes with…

Heather Dalton has been part of the Denver music scene for decades, as a musician and TV show host and producer. Her latest project, Sounds on 29th, is a live performance and comedy show gearing up for its third season on local TV stationCPT12 this spring. A collaboration with director…

Few people can claim to know Lance Armstrong in the same way as Jonathan Vaughters, a cyclist and native Coloradan who became Armstrong’s friend, teammate — and eventually, his enemy. Now, the CEO of Slipstream Sports is featured in a documentary called The Armstrong Lie, which is scheduled to open…

The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he’s a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, he hasn’t been able to readjust to…

Once, in the middle of the 2004 Tour de France bicycling race, the nine-man American team, led by Lance Armstrong, pretended that their bus had broken down en route to their hotel. As fans and the international press stood outside, cheering and taking pictures, the team, hidden behind high, tinted…

The breadth of director Shaul Schwarz’s documentary Narco Cultura is staggering. A hybrid of hard investigative journalism and incisive cultural criticism, the film, at its core, is about definitions of success and power, and how today those terms are shaped by the shared forces of poverty and celebrity culture. Schwarz…

Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…

Fifteen years ago (December 4, 1998) an unusual movie was released…and roundly rejected: director Gus Van Sant’s off-puttingly faithful remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Fresh off the critical and commercial success of Good Will Hunting, Van Sant could’ve tried for another feel-good hit or a high-profile for-hire gig. Instead, he…

The Alamo Drafthouse has only been open for a short while, but has already become and indispensable resource for Denver-area cinephiles. Engaging with the local film and comedy scenes through events like Mile High Sci-Fi the Drafthouse supports the local creative community and provides a calendar filled with events suited to every type of film buff, from the snobbiest cineaste to the inexplicably carefree sort of person who loves singing along to musicals. Throughout December, the Alamo Drafthouse has a schedules slate of niche programming that will hold particular appeal for Westword writers by celebrating the news in cinema.

Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are fifteen docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…

Sleeping away from home is scary. Hotels hotels, motels and other temporary sleeping arrangements can be full of bed bugs, meth residue and sketchy-ass neighbors — and when you step out of real life and into the world of horror movies, you can add murderous ghosts, zombies and psychotic clerks…

One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances…

Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…

Unlike the Park Chan-wook picture it’s based on, Spike Lee’s Oldboy is drab and humorless, devoid of the stylistic curlicues that can get you through even a bad Spike Lee film. Like its hero, a clueless lug who’s imprisoned for twenty years by an invisible captor for a transgression he…

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…

Photo by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle – © 2012 – OB Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. “I was appalled and disappointed,” says Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek of Spike Lee’s Oldboy on this week’s Voice Film podcast. “I love [Park Chan-wook’s] original and watching Spike Lee’s version, there were big…