Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-sized piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…
Kirk Hanna was a cattle rancher, a conservationist and a Colorado legend before his untimely death at age 43. His pursuit of a utopian vision for the ranching way of life, and his impact on open-space preservation and resource management, are just part of the story told in Hanna Ranch,…
Some things are just too good to be true, like a Dune film starring Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and David Carradine, directed by cult-film legend Alejandro Jodorowsky, with effects and art by Mœbius, H.R. Giger and Dan O’Bannon. Such a thing is clearly too awesome to exist, but…
Amy Metier. The William Havu Gallery is currently showing Amy Metier: Preconceived Notions, a marvelous solo that’s filled with modernist-derived abstractions. The show — Metier’s first in-town solo in two years — fills the gallery’s entire main level, not only with her signature paintings, but also with prints featuring experimental…
Surely, at some point, they thought of casting Michael Cera. Richard Ayoade’s often marvelous The Double, an existential jest set in a bureaucratic dystopia so familiar and lightly comic it may as well be Kafka Fantasy Camp, stars Jesse Eisenberg, the Oscar winner and future Lex Luthor, as a beleaguered…
When it comes to social or political movements, Americans tend to favor hero narratives that focus on or elevate individuals. And if the tale ends in tragedy, we want there to be some sort of blaze-of-glory defiance in play. As outlined in the documentary Hanna Ranch (see Night & Day…
It’s been a few days since I saw David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, screening here in competition, and I’m still not completely sure what I think of this sometimes-smart, sometimes-arch ultra-black comedy about shallow Hollywood types. But one thing’s for sure: Julianne Moore is a knockout in it. Moore…
America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Lawrence, truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s managed to graciously lose an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swan above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster…
#492425863 / gettyimages.com Marion Cotillard, the star of the Dardenne Brothers’ competition film Two Days, One Night, showed up for the photo call on Tuesday in a mini-dress encrusted with a riot of buttons, a whimsical and rather adorable choice for an actress who, on-screen just a few minutes earlier,…
A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…
Stephanie Zacharek has been reporting online from the Cannes Film Festival. For much more, including a couple daft cartoons she drew, visit westword.com/movies/. Foxcatcher Even if Steve Carell’s performance in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher — a terrific one — ends up being the most lauded in the film, what Channing Tatum…
James McAvoy knows not to trust the British tabloids. While flogging his grotty drama Filth, based on the Irvine Welsh novel about a coke-addicted, double-crossing cop, they breathlessly reported that the Scottish actor had dived so deep into method acting that he’d convinced a German hooker to punch him in…
Some films are just meant to be seen on the big screen, but apart from a handful of cult classics and genre favorites, opportunities to do so can be few and far between. Denver’s Landmark Theatre chain is looking to change that with “A Film for All Seasons,” a 24-week…
It was Jason Tugman’s first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams. A former circus fire-eater, he’d taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Schestuhl and L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson are joined by special guest Chris Klimek to discuss the strange career of Tom Cruise, the new X-Men movie, and why Han Solo should die. We close the show with a special phone…
In 2009, George Tiller, one of only a handful of doctors who performed late-term abortions in this counry, was fatally shot while attending church services in his home town of Wichita, Kansas. In a one-night-only showing tonight, Physicians for Human Rights Colorado and the Sie FilmCenter will present After Tiller,…
American Ninja Warrior returned to Denver this week to hold tryouts for the TV show. Challengers tackled an obstacle course set up in Civic Center Park in an attempt to prove they have what it takes to be the Ultimate American Ninja Warrior. Photographer Marissa Shevins was there to capture…
This summer’s Film on the Rocks schedule is out; as in past years, the festival will feature old favorites, newer films, local artists and more at Red Rocks. See also: World Football Film Festival kicks off in Denver in June…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla chest hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Toho Co. Ltd. extravaganza. In that…
Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture what his own Swingers was to the ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef’s-knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…
Nothing in Stage Fright, a horror-musical hybrid that plays like a sleepy, off-brand Troma movie, is as good as Meat Loaf. A walrus-mustachioed Loaf plays Roger McCall, the skeevy owner of Center Stage, a summer camp for young musical theater performers. To generate the ticket sales that will pay his…
