Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi-road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff, shown at the last New York Film Festival, is that and more — one great leap into the nineteenth-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train…
When it came out in 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the most violent movies ever made — so violent it was actually banned in several countries — but that’s not what makes it so great. In fact, by today’s CG-enhanced standards, it pretty tame. A long shot…
Now in its roughly one-millionth year, Who Wants to be a Millionaire is still going strong, although it’s a little different now than it was before you probably stopped paying attention. For one thing, original host Regis Philbin is long gone, replaced by Meredith Vieira, who, disconcertingly, kind of resembles…
The finest Western you’ll see this year is set in aristocratic sixteenth-century France, in the heat of counter-Reformation. In The Princess of Montpensier, Mélanie Thierry’s father barters her for the titular title, marrying her off to Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet’s shy, pained prince — instead of her heart’s first choice, Gaspard Ulliel’s…
Galileo’s Garden. Husband-and-wife artists Tyler and Monica Aiello are the subjects of conjoined solos at Space Gallery. The exhibit, Galileo’s Garden, includes over three dozen pieces. Though working in entirely different mediums — Tyler in metal sculpture, Monica in mixed-media painting — they long ago forged a formal relationship by…
Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal) and produced by Hilary Swank, in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack — one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this…
Just in case you doubted that Westword was the foremost authority on dumb shit that happens in the media, know this: We’re such an authority even other media outlets seek our expertise. And when I say “our expertise,” I mean “my expertise.” Yesterday, in advance of the Violent Torpedo of…
Ben Affleck has acted in some truly horrible movies. After citing the Oscar he won with his best friend, Affleck’s resume reads like a list of the worst movies from the late ’90s that we all thought were sorta okay at the time (just like Sugar Ray). In 2003, he…
Blink! A young curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, Jill Desmond, has stepped up to the big time by putting together an over-the-top exhibit of electronic and mechanical art titled Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Image. Beginning on the first level of the Hamilton and taking over the…
Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, Rubber follows the exploits of a tire (listed in the credits as “Robert”) that figures out how to control its own motion and then rolls through the desert on a killing spree, blowing shit up with its mind. Rubber’s methods of address make it…
“This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…
While we’re pretty much terrified of shrubbery now after Thorin Klosowski’s earlier post on murderous fictional plants, it’s important to remember that even if in movies plants bring certain death, in the real world, they bring life. And tonight on Rocky Mountain PBS, the locally produced documentary Green Up Colorado…
Blink! A young curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, Jill Desmond, has stepped up to the big time by putting together an over-the-top exhibit of electronic and mechanical art titled Blink!: Light, Sound and the Moving Image. Beginning on the first level of the Hamilton and taking over the…
Sharing the narrative opacity and marginal milieu of Hamilton, its 2006 predecessor, Putty Hill, the assured feature-length followup from Matt Porterfield, surveys the effects of a young man’s overdose death on his extended working-class family. And like the militantly decentralized storytelling that Porterfield favors, their grief surfaces in flashes but…
Anthropomorphizing its animal stars to a borderline-dubious degree, Disneynature’s non-fiction African Cats situates itself in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, where two four-legged mothers valiantly struggle to provide for and protect their young. On the northern side of the river that divides this gorgeous but pitiless land lives aging lioness…
When 13 Families, a new documentary about how the families of the thirteen victims of the Columbine shootings cope with their loss, premieres tonight at the Denver FilmCenter, it will be a new experience for the public. After so much media focus on the more sensational and political aspects of…
It’s been fifteen years since Scream came along and changed the whole horror movie paradigm with its self-awareness, satirizing the cliches of a genre then in the throes of death by indifference and employing them as plot devices, in the process pretty much single-handedly breathing life back into it. It…
Ever since he ended up as conspicuously the only member of the Breakfast Club not to get coupled up — and was pretty much okay with it — we knew Anthony Michael Hall was a guy we could identify with. Lanky, bug-eyed and just a little too weirdly enthusiastic, he…
Though it’s largely been forgotten in the annals of crack-pottery and snake-oil salesmanship, the story of Mark Kostabi is one of the art world’s weirdest and most head-slappingly dumb. A darling of the high-rolling ’80s New York scene, Kostabi and his rise to fame and riches on the backs of…
Mi Linda Soledad. This large exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center zeroes in on the career of one of Colorado’s most important abstract painters, Emilio Lobato. The show’s title, which means “My Beautiful Solitude,” refers both to Lobato’s life growing up in the San Luis Valley and to…
The opening title card of François Ozon’s 1977-set Potiche seems to take design inspiration from the exploitation films of that period — a sneaky-smart way of nodding to one of this pastel-colored political farce’s key topics, if not its stylistic mode. As Suzanne, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role, which…
Set in the months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s Theater — specifically, the trial of Mary Surratt, Catholic, 42, and the owner of a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse, who was presented before a military tribunal as the den mother in…
