According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing made $17 million last year — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar is likely most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but…
The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth airs Sundays on Showtime In filmmaking, an assembly cut is when recent dailies are strung together in rough narrative order to create the first, very raw draft of the movie. Though it by no means lacks polish or editorial intent, Showtime’s…
The first wave of frightful programming has just been announced for 2016’s sole local horror film festival survivor, the Telluride Horror Show, which takes place October 14 through 16. And it’s a bloody array of gems just waiting to be mined in the eerie mountain town. “Our first batch represents…
This week, our critics boldly reviewed a new Spock-doc, Clint Eastwood gave us a hero’s happy ending with Sully and our Trump-induced daydreams about moving to Norway slowly faded in In Order of Disappearance. Here is every new film that’s just opened in Denver, plus one bonus ongoing film that you must…
Some filmmakers tell great stories. Jason Halprin chooses not to. In films he’ll show Saturday night at Cinema Contra, he refuses to dictate to audiences how or what they should feel or think. The 38-year-old experimental filmmaker grew up in Pueblo. In high school, he seeped himself in the writings…
Before The Eric Andre Show came along, I always thought acting like a complete lunatic on television was mostly a white-people thing. As a culture, African-Americans generally frown upon the idea of being unabashedly clownish for the masses — black folks call it “showing your ass.” All those years of…
The Bachelor stands erect as the vanguard of heterosexual romance competitions. Bachelor in Paradise (BIP), whose third season concludes this week, is the sunburnt, daydrunk cousin of the ABC franchise. Set in the Ewok Village on the Planet Endor (the perfect place to fall in love), the summertime distraction stars…
We should be tired of wondering why Scandinavians are so fascinated with runaway crime — it’s obviously because they have so little of it. Set in Chicago or Bangkok or Juarez, vicious bloodletting might play like wallpaper, but it comes off as almost surreal, and a little gimmicky, when framed…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
Leonard Nimoy’s 1975 memoir I Am Not Spock stirred fan outrage: How dare the actor, who was indeed Spock in the original Star Trek series, publicly dismiss his beloved half-human, half-Vulcan alter ego? According to Adam Nimoy, Leonard’s son and the director of the heartwarming but uninventive documentary For the…
Colorado has long offered its scenery to movies, and now thousands of lucky locals will get a chance to star in one. Casting directors are hosting an open casting call for Netflix’s adaptation of the Kent Haruf novel “Our Souls at Night.” Starring Robert Redford (!) and Jane Fonda (!), the…
“I don’t have any answers,” Krzysztof Kieslowski once said, “but [I] do know how to pose questions.” Not an uncommon stance for an artist, certainly, but perhaps surprising for one who made a massive, 10-part miniseries based on the Ten Commandments. Later, trying to explain why he and screenwriter Krzysztof…
Starting with 1985’s No End, composer Zbigniew Preisner served as one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s closest collaborators — he worked on all of the director’s films until Kieslowski’s death in 1996, with several of their collaborations actually revolving around the world of music. (The duo even created a fake Dutch composer, Van den Budenmayer,…
Since Colorado is a lot less purple this time around, we probably won’t be seeing the plethora of political ads that we have in election years past. That means a lot more room for the usual slate of the usual advertising suspects here in the Mile High City, for better…
Here’s a gorgeous and audacious slice of East Bay life that’s dreamily attentive to Northern California sun and concrete, to the shambled beauty of a street couch under a BART station, to the slow thump of cruising stoned with hip hop bumping, to the way suburb-city edges into city-city and…
Eight minutes into the pilot episode of Cinemax’s new crime show Quarry — an uneven but largely rewarding translation of Max Allan Collins’ crime books into emotionally challenging, character-driven television — Marine Lloyd “Mac” Conway, Jr. (Logan Marshall-Green) returns home a day early from his second tour in Vietnam. By…
Christian Carion’s refugees-on-the-march World War II drama Come What May is the kind of old-fashioned war movie that’s crafted not just to emphasize history’s horror and brutality. Yes, Carion stages the occasional slaughter with heartsick brio, and sometimes can’t resist taking pleasure when the violence goes against the bad guys,…
A decade after the fact, the scandal of JT LeRoy — the HIV-positive, young male (though gender-fluid) writer adored by scores of global alt celebrities who was revealed to be the creation of a woman named Laura Albert — is relitigated in Jeff Feuerzeig’s queasily absorbing documentary Author: The JT…
Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
“Oh my God. Sorry. Gosh. I just can’t believe it actually happened.” This is an omniscient narrator speaking. Jane the Virgin’s Latin Lover Narrator (yes, that is how he is credited) has just witnessed the titular heroine tie the knot at the end of the CW show’s second season. Everything…
Here it comes, the crisp chill of September, when shorts during the day give way to hoodies and pants at night. The air conditioning in your local movie house will be turned off, and a warm bucket of popcorn will keep your fingers toasty and buttery. In no time at…
Cities, like young people, are forever becoming something new. The latest tender charmer from Ira Sachs chronicles the growing pains of teens and Brooklyn with the wry sensitivity and eye for economic reality that distinguished Sachs’ Love Is Strange (2014) and Keep the Lights On (2012), which began a sort…
