Married women over thirty, here’s a pitch for a movie: My Dinner With Idris. You never thought it would happen to you, but one rainy night when your handsome and successful but distracted husband who doesn’t appreciate you is out of town, Idris Elba (The Wire, Mandela: Long Walk to…
This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.” Ninety minutes later, Smith responded: “Not me. Been hacked. Proud to be bi-curious, not brave enough to commit.” But the Internet already knew that…
What’s fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle, he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
With the DocuWest International Film Festival kicking off tonight, movie buffs throughout the city are talking about their favorite documentaries. To honor the genre’s long and varied history, we’ve compiled a list of ten must-see films for doc lovers. Some of these movies are famous, some are notorious and others…
Terry Gilliam fans have reason to be very happy — not only does he have a brand-new film, The Zero Theorem, opening in just over a week, but this week the International Film Series is showing two of his classic movies — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The…
In 2007, Sender Films began shooting interviews with rock climbers for a then-unnamed documentary about Yosemite National Park. At the time, the Boulder-based production house was already well-established as climbing filmmakers go, with four full-length movies and innumerable shorts to its credit. (It’s since added two more features and a…
Boulder filmmaker iKE ALLEN told friends that he was hoping to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show of country music. Days later, he got a call from Reverend Yolanda, a New York City-based drag queen and minister who was using her campy performances to spread the word of the Lord…
After The Princess Bride made Robin Wright a star, she shocked Hollywood by saying no. No to The Firm and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. No to Jurassic Park, Dirty Dancing, Born on the Fourth of July, and Batman Forever. She even said no to the cover of Vanity Fair…
If older-man/younger-woman matchups make a lot of people uncomfortable, the older-man/much-younger-woman combo tends to make them apoplectic. It would be impossible for Nabokov to publish Lolita today, now that all of life, and all of art, must be arranged, categorized and restricted as a way of protecting not just our…
Early in Dan Krauss’s The Kill Team, a soldier shares that when he was about to enter a firefight, Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone” would pop into his head. The emotional disconnect between a soldier’s perception of reality and reality itself is the subject of this documentary, which finds drama in…
Angela Beloian and Roger Hubbard. For In Technicolor, her new exhibit at Walker Fine Art, Boulder artist Angela Beloian created a body of retro ’60s and ’70s paintings and screen prints based on “sketches” done using an iPhone. The works refer to minimalism, abstract surrealism and psychedelic art using just…
Since it’s the kind of slow-building movie whose very premise is something of a spoiler, a pretty delicious one, let’s get the consumer-guide jazz out of the way first. Hilary Brougher’s YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody…
The Identical is Elvis slash fiction that could have been written by a spinster church organist. Its premise is intriguing: What if Jesse Presley, Elvis’s twin brother, who was stillborn at birth, was in fact secretly given to a traveler minister (Ray Liotta) and his infertile wife (Ashley Judd)? What…
Forrest Gump has turned twenty and is celebrating its birthday with a week-long IMAX release. It’s a significant milestone for the six-time Academy Award winner. Today, 1994 is as far away from the present as the Vietnam War was from it. Forrest Gump was a fable without a moral, the…
Most of us would agree that there’s only one Al Pacino. But this year in Venice, there are actually two: Pacino appears in two films at the festival — David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, about a lonely Texas locksmith stuck in a romantic dream; and, playing out of competition, Barry Levinson’s…
Even the most inspiration-averse will have eyes as moist as blowholes by the end credits of Dolphin Tale 2, a good-hearted kids’ drama whose earnestness and surprising moral complexity put other sunny-weepy sea-mammal flicks to shame. After the story wraps up, the filmmakers work a trick that’s become common in…
Denver Film Society programming manager Ernie Quiroz has been on the job for a year now. In that time, he’s learned that Denver film audiences are nothing if not surprising. “There’s some films that I did that I thought would go over great, and just utterly bombed,” he says. “And…
Denver movie lovers should invest in some eye drops and caffeine pills and brace themselves for a nonstop month of cinematic bliss. To get a sense of just how much is going on, consider all the festivals that deserve mention yet didn’t make this list: The Southern Colorado Film Festival,…
Genius is hell, both for the blessed and for those stuck in the shadows, cursed to spend a lifetime smashing their heads against the glass. In its presence we find ourselves dwarfed and dumb, like moths. We know we’re before brilliance we can’t comprehend — and we know we’ll never…
Weep at another whiff of an Elmore Leonard adaptation, one that nails down neither the peppery laughs nor the street-crime desperation that are key to the writer’s work. Rather, Life of Crime is too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a…
