In The Revenant, a soldier dies in Iraq, only to awaken back home as a member of the living dead. But this particular undead guy isn’t quite a vampire, and he isn’t quite a zombie — he’s a revenant, a restless spirit returned in corporeal form. From that relatively straightforward…
Continental Drift. To create Continental Drift, MCA Denver curator Nora Burnett Abrams and Aspen Art Museum curator Jacob Proctor looked at the work of more than 300 Colorado artists who had submitted portfolios. Abrams and Proctor then winnowed the hundreds of submitters down to a mere twenty and scheduled them…
Social media’s role in the would-be Iranian revolution of 2009 is by this point much hyped, but no one has yet covered it quite like Ali Samadi Ahadi in The Green Wave. In both form and content, the filmmaker refuses the orthodox, eschewing the official record in favor of narrated…
Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s fourth film as writer-director, is a sequel to her 2007 2 Days in Paris. Itself a spinoff of sorts, Paris piggybacked on the popularity of 2004’s justly…
After its Sundance premiere, Compliance might be infamous as the film that inspired a woman to cry out “Rape is not entertainment!” However, writer/director Craig Zobel is not Daniel Tosh. Judging from the film itself, which keeps its final sexual assault entirely off-screen, Zobel seems to agree with that heckler/critic…
A winter storm of ski and snowboard video premiere parties will pummel Denver and Boulder over the next two months, as local theaters roll out the white carpet for VIPs (Very Important Pros), local/national/international filmmakers and snow-dancing revelers. We’ve put together the most comprehensive guide we could muster — with…
Zachary Byron Helm pushes the boundaries of horror in his upcoming film, Death Hearse on Satan’s Titty Highway, which he’s filming right here, right now in Englewood. And it should be a wild ride. See also: – Q&A: Artist Daniel Crosier of Mother Mind Studios – Ten weird movie references…
Though its sister theater, the Mayan, seems to grab all the attention as an historical treasure, Landmark’s Esquire Theatre is actually a little bit older — though you wouldn’t know it from its moderne facade. But while the Mayan, which opened in 1930, survives — with tweaks — as the…
A trio of filmmakers from Carbondale won three of the four festival awards at the Chamonix Adventure Festival over the weekend in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France: Tyler Stableford won the Jury Prize for Shattered, his portrait of alpinist Steve House (see it in full after the jump); Skip Armstrong and Forge Motion…
“I have always been against this idea of the ‘clash of cultures,'” Marjane Satrapi says. “It’s the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve ever heard.” That’s apparent from her films and graphic novels, which bridge worlds. Born in Iran, Satrapi emigrated to Europe with her family when she was a teenager…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
It might be true that we hurt the ones we love the most, but André Téchiné’s epic neo-family drama depicts offenses—attempted murder, mid-funeral beat downs, sex videos for Daddy—that no relation should have to countenance. Alain Resnais mainstay André Dussollier plays Francis, a best-selling mystery writer who travels to Venice…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, and to top the Hollywood A-list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in…
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors, and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year old in Nowheresville whose…
David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…
At tonight’s installment of the Denver Film Society’s Women + Film series, PeaceJam’s Dawn Engle will be the woman, and The Mayan Renaissance will be the film. This fastidious and lovely history of Mayan civilization and culture fast-forwards into the present, as it is seen by Nobel laureate (and PeaceJam…
Blockbuster, now a subsidy of Dish Network, yesterday officially opened its international headquarters in Colorado — specifically, at the Meridian International Office Park in Douglas County. The move comes with the possibility of $2.5 million in Job Growth Incentive Tax Credits from the Colorado Economic Development Commission, since Blockbuster promises…
Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man such a gift. In telling the tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American balladeer from Detroit who cut a…
It’s a hard world to be different in,” says Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) to her Pinterest/vision-board child Timothy (CJ Adams) while trying to explain why he must cover up the leaves that sprout on his legs. “Lots of people hate anything that’s different.” That hammer-to-nail, nutshelled life lesson is one…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
