Like a classic reel of 35mm click-clacking through a projector’s sprockets, film events keep unspooling across metro Denver. Even if the weather is great this month, you’ll want to head inside to catch the ten best film events in March, presented here in chronological order. 10. The Brakhage Center Symposium…
In Zootopia, animals do a lot of the things that animals in Disney movies usually do: They speak, to begin with; they walk upright and wear funny clothes; they exhibit attitudes that align or ironically misalign with their species’ appearance and reputation; they hold jobs; they experience outsize emotion and…
The title of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s strained dark comedy, in which the War in Afghanistan serves as the backdrop to an American woman’s self-actualizing journey, is the military phonetic-alphabet rendering of WTF. The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting…
The Boulder International Film Festival will unreel its twelfth iteration March 3 through March 6, with two new venues in outlying towns and more screenings of festival favorites. “Some of these films are so popular, we just couldn’t get in everyone who wanted to see them,” says BIFF Executive Director Robin Beeck…
Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
One of the sweetest homegrown creations to emerge in the Colorado film community in recent years is Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema: a mobile, four-seat screening room for short, silent Super 8mm films, complete with live musical accompaniment by charming huckster Gravey himself. David Weaver, aka Gravey, the big brain behind this…
Since 2015’s When Marnie Was There looks to be its final new film for the foreseeable future, it makes sense that Studio Ghibli would circle back around to its beginnings. Isao Takahata’s 1991 Only Yesterday was not Ghibli’s first feature, however; it was preceded by Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 Castle in…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…
In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
Director John Carpenter has made some of the most memorable films of the last forty years, and one of the things that made them memorable was the music: Carpenter has been the music composer for his entire catalog — and beyond. Now Carpenter’s bringing his music into a different kind…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…
The world-famous Sundance Film Festival and its film-incubating Sundance Labs are kicking off the sixth year of Film Forward, a touring program of indie films and filmmakers, in Denver with the Denver Film Society, which will host two free screenings on February 22 and 23 at the Sie FilmCenter. Sundance…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…
Surrounding states may be more popular places to film movies, but Colorado has one of the biggest, most burgeoning film scenes around. Not only do we have the chance to watch great films every day, but there are dozens of festivals in the Denver area and around the state dedicated…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
The Boulder International Film Festival just announced that Oscar-nominated actor Bruce Dern (The Hateful Eight, Nebraska, Coming Home) will be honored at the twelfth annual festival. A Conversation with and Tribute to Bruce Dern is set for Friday, March 4, at the Boulder Theater, 2032 14th Street. Dern’s first screen credit…
Filmmaker Oliver Stone was one of Hollywood’s most controversial directors in the ’90s, tackling stories rife with conspiracy theories and often testing the mores of the American viewing public. Now a new biography about Stone and a new film by him, focusing on Edward Snowden, is bringing Stone back into…
