Ski Porn: MSP, Stept Productions, Level 1 unveil 2012 video trailers

Colorado has become the Hollywood of the adventure-film business, and the local ski-porn premiere season will be in full swing by this time next month. But the Colorado-based crews at Matchstick Productions (MSP), Level 1 Productions and Stept Productions have already released tantalizing teasers for their 2012 films. Here’s a…

A brief cinematic history of Mars

This Sunday, the most ambitious mission to Mars thus far will land on the red planet. The Curiosity Rover is on a two-year mission to look for signs of life, study its climate and geology and collect data that might help future manned missions. The Denver Museum of Nature and…

In The Queen of Versailles, the rich eat you

Vividly bringing to life the question of whether self-denial is a social responsibility that Don DeLillo poses in Cosmopolis, Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles, tracks the post-crash lifestyle of rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude. The titular royal is Jackie Siegel,…

Oslo, August 31st shows that even a shattered life matters

Joachim Trier has proven to be unparalleled in exposing the foibles and delusions of all the sad young literary men — or of one man in particular. The twenty-something character played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Reprise (2006) finds immediate cult success with his first novel, only to suffer a…

Trishna sets Thomas Hardy’s Tess in modern-day India

Michael Winterbottom is multi-tasking — like that’s a surprise. He’s made a dozen films in the past decade, as varied as the Steve Coogan-as-Steve Coogan joints 24 Hour Party People and The Trip, the controversial Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me, and two radically different assessments of the War…

In crime thriller Easy Money, no one gets away clean

As the general run of action films blithely defies the laws of gravity and consequence, what a pleasure to find a movie as grounded, physically and emotionally, as Daniel Espinosa’s downbeat pulper Easy Money. A hit in its native Sweden as Snabba Cash, the English title is a piece of…

Ten best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes

Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will get a special treat tonight, when National CineMedia brings two episodes of the classic series (complete with newly polished special effects) to the big screen, including the United Artists Denver Pavilions 15. That’s the good news. The less good news is the episodes…

Cinema Q kicks off a weekend of queer films tonight at Denver FilmCenter

Now in its fourth year, the Cinema Q Festival at the Denver FilmCenter showcases the many sides of GLBTQ film, with movies that capture everything from social-justice issues to stunningly accurate portrayals of everyday queer life. More than a dozen films, handpicked by programming director Keith Garcia, will be shown…

Christopher Nolan’s ponderous Dark Knight saga continues

Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception as it is of Nolan’s superhero saga, now swollen into a trilogy…

Now Showing

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…

The absorbing Neil Young Journeys is another Jonathan Demme triumph

Not to knock films as fantastic as Rachel Getting Married, The Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, but there’s something wilder — or at least more directly stimulating and pure — about director Jonathan Demme’s live-performance docs. The 68-year-old auteur immortalized a Talking Heads show in Stop Making Sense,…

Breaking Bad‘s 10 greatest scenes (so far)

For four seasons, Breaking Bad has chronicled the journey of Walter White from “Mr Chips to Scarface,” as creator Vince Gilligan puts it. The end of the last season saw White taking out his number one adversary in spectacular fashion, marking the beginning of the final phase of his transformation…

Now Showing

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…

Beasts of the Southern Wild views life through a child’s eyes

A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern-Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s six-year-old (also Wallis’s age during filming) protagonist and narrator,…

The probing Kumare chronicles a joke turned serious

Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary — and not just those about religious longing and “spirituality,” its ostensible subjects, but about how deep the genre that gave us Borat and Morgan Spurlock’s spotty oeuvre can go. Kumaré is essentially the…

Memory and emotion inform the elliptical Goodbye First Love

Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, Goodbye First Love, begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a highly emotional high school girl in love, is fifteen, and tracks her through her mid-twenties as she’s establishing a career. We first follow Camille through her all-consuming romance with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a…

A tour doc reveals Katy Perry’s essential Katy Perry-ness

From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty “I Kissed a Girl” on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to play-acting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal…