The first ten minutes of Pariah — Dee Rees’s funny, moving, nuanced and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable — sharply reveal the conflicts that seventeen-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. Riding the bus back to her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home after a…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s hit play, Carnage, stars Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet as two sets of Brooklyn parents whose social, economic and philosophical differences are leveled in less than eighty minutes by their pettiness and immaturity. Posh pair Alan and Nancy (Waltz…
This week Denver skate shop 303 Boards (1338 East Colfax Avenue) dropped the second teaser for its forthcoming team video Queen City, featuring Mike Marks, Matt Kehoe, Brendan Macleod, and Cody Hodge. The film, due out this spring, is the latest in a long line of videos the shop made…
With the release of The Devil Inside, out Friday, the cinema gods are taking a moment to remind all of us that religion is scary — It’s all higher powers and judgments and abductions by beings of light and women turning into salt and beings of pure good offset by…
Currently in the spotlight for his latest film, Melancholia — in which life goes on in a world under the threat of total destruction — Danish director Lars von Trier peppers his movies with avant-garde visuals, misogyny, complex stories and stylized stagings. And since the release of Element of Crime…
Film-going ain’t what it used to be. But thanks to the Denver Film Society, you can enjoy an old-school viewing experience on Tuesdays in January, when the DFS will roll out brand-new prints of five foreign classics on the big screen at the Denver FilmCenter. The weekly screenings flicker on…
Takeshi Kitano’s latest finds the actor-director returning to the familiar terrain of the yakuza film after recent farces (Achilles and the Tortoise, Glory to the Filmmaker!) dealing with artistic endeavor. Stark and brutal, Outrage is a litany of startlingly violent set pieces filmed in Kitano’s decorous, aestheticized style, gunshots blooming…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Depending on who you’re listening to, the world is going to end in 2012, or the world will undergo some sort of transformation. Either way it’s spiritual. What’s not spiritual, however, are these cold, hard numbers: The top ten posts on Show and Tell during 2011, which may or may…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
With a chewy title to tip us off, director Carl Colby’s compelling and tricky portrait of his late pop, The Man Nobody Knew, streamlines and connects two vital relationships — one familial, the other between a man and his country. A former OSS officer who parachuted into Nazi terrain, the…
A doggedly overwrought production less felt than facile, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is an essentially uninvolving prestige adaptation. It might be perverse to accuse a tearjerker as accomplished as Spielberg of being unfeeling. But the overcalculation with which he mechanically trots out one of his most familiar tropes for what…
A Dangerous Method, the title of David Cronenberg’s viscerally cerebral new film, is something of an understatement. As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous science-fiction romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5000 Fathoms. Adapted by…
Call it a quarter-life crisis: Andy Raney does. Because before watching the documentary that resulted, it’s slightly difficult to imagine why two adult males — Raney and co-creator Jeremy Make — would travel the United States in a used and dilapidated golf kart named Christine for a hundred days, moving…
An undeniably charming homage to Hollywood in the late 1920s, The Artist might also be the first silent film many of its viewers have ever seen. French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius eases neophytes’ discomfort by creating the cinematic equivalent of an amuse-bouche. Although many of the technical aspects of the silent…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher’s sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster directed by Niels Arden Oplev from Stieg Larsson’s rambling thriller — a posthumously published international bestseller and Kindle record-holder — is a recognizably Fincherian caper. The movie, which…
When I told someone I was off to a screening of We Bought a Zoo the other day, the response was an eye roll. The reaction’s understandable: Save for two music docs — an Elton John-Leon Russell album making-of and that Pearl Jam anniversary infomercial — Cameron Crowe has been…
The spirit of gift-giving seems to have gotten seriously lost, what with people getting seasoned with pepper-spray and countless hordes of poor suckers using their credit cards like drunken whores. So why not say “Fuck Mastercard!” and give some affordable presents that everyone on your list will appreciate — and…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About twenty minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure (a revelatory Zoé Héran), a…
Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…
