For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the La La Lands of Entourage and Mulholland…
The Denver International Film Festival continues through this weekend with the much-anticipated screening of Heath Ledger’s new flick, Candy, on Friday, November 17, at 9:30 p.m., and Saturday, November 18, at 9:45 p.m. Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in this don’t-try-it-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Forbidden Planet (Warner Bros.) Long available as faded discount product, Fred McLeod Wilcox’s 1956 masterpiece — the movie without which Star Trek, Star Wars, 2001, and, oh, Lost in Space wouldn’t exist — at last gets its proper due; this double-disc collection comes with everything but stardust and rocket fuel…
It’s getting harder and harder for Denver audiences to see their hometown hero and Last Comic Standing winner Josh Blue, as he’s booked solid through June 2007, headlining rooms all over the nation. Sure, those glued to the city’s comedy scene can catch him every now and again when he…
Time perhaps scrambling it’s for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu to stop his narratives. After making an exciting debut in 2000 with Amores Perros — a movie whose gimmicky Tarantino-esque tinkering with structure seemed fresher en español and grounded in gritty Mexico City location shooting — Gonzalez Iñarritu apparently decided to devote…
Pity Max Skinner, emasculated over his lamb chops. On a gray afternoon, at London’s hotspot du jour, his gloating superior unveils a plot to poach his most lucrative client, divesting him of a six-figure (pounds sterling) bonus in the process. Fuck it. The bummed-out bond trader hands in a resignation…
Once an actor gets big enough to take whatever kind of role he wants, it makes sense that the biggest stretch imaginable, given his current situation, is the part of a powerless man with no control over the world around him. Call it a “nice” movie — a vehicle designed…
Among documentary muckrakers, Kirby Dick may not be as righteously indignant as Michael Moore or as brilliantly droll as Nick Broomfield, but say this for the maker and star of This Film Is Not Yet Rated: He’s not afraid to soil his hands to get the story. Rummaging through the…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
The Junky’s Christmas (Koch) They just aren’t cranking out claymation Christmas specials like they used to, which makes this a welcome one. Nicer still, it’s got heroin! A mixture of stop motion with a little puppetry and live-action shots of William Burroughs (who may himself have been a Muppet), this…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…
Milestone in Motion Picture History: On Halloween weekend 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq War era’s bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don’t include Jesus of Nazareth. God or Jack Valenti only knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating “for…
Eugene Yelchin. Over the past several years, Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind has often presented exhibits highlighting the work of Jewish artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. And for these exhibits, Zalkind has turned to Mina Litinsky, director of the Sloan Gallery in LoDo, who’s an acknowledged expert…
Mission: Impossible III: Special Edition (Paramount) On the commentary track, director J.J. Abrams and star Tom Cruise sound like they’ve fallen in love; you might say they complete each other’s sentences, except that’s just Cruise interrupting the Alias creator, who rescued a franchise by streamlining it, lightening it, brightening it,…
“I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin,” reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs’s wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru’s carnivalesque commune. “No one is gonna believe me anyway.” No one? In fact,…
Of all the hundreds of pedophile priests to be flushed out of the woodwork in recent Catholic Church history, Father Oliver O’Grady has to be one of the most harmless-looking — and the most sinister. Wispy, unremarkable and accommodating, with an ingratiating half-smile playing permanently about his thin lips, Father…
They say youse can never go home again. Nevertheless, Queens-bred big-timer Dito Montiel revisits his old Astoria stamping grounds in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a Sundance-sanctioned testosterone indie loosely based on the thirty-something writer-director and occasional fashion model’s neo-Beat semi-autobiography of the same name. Montiel may be a…
Manufactured history guarantees a manufactured controversy: Gabriel Range’s Death of a President, which docu-dramatizes the 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, has been preceded by long, raucous fanfare. Excoriated on talk radio, damned as a snuff film, banned by two theater chains, the British production has also garnered celebrity dis-endorsements…
There’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters — men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff” — are being trained at an African National Congress safehouse in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized by…
Artland: USA is a twelve-part television series that explores art and architecture across America from behind the wheel of an RV — and in the third episode, which screens tonight, hosts Charles Luxton and Mame McCutchin motor from tiny Marfa, Texas, to the Mile High City. Along the way, Luxton…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
