Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights selections for Wednesday, November 11: Virgin Mountain. Virgin Mountain Directed by Dagur…
How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On August 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the hundred-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international…
Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means that there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights his pick for Tuesday, November 10: War of Lies. War of…
Regular Denver Film Festival-goers tend to judge their experiences in part by the percentage of good movies to lousy ones they see before each edition of DFF runs its course. By that measure, my experiences since catching Charlie Kaufman’s low-key, defiantly weird Anomalisa on the fest’s opening night this past Wednesday…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights his choice for Monday, November 9: 600 Miles. 600 Miles…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights selections for November 6 (Once Upon a Crime: The Borelli-Davis Conspiracy),…
The 38th edition of the Denver Film Festival started off quietly — and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The opening night festivities were back at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House after taking place at the Buell Theatre last year, and while the red carpet was in place outside the…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights his pick for Thursday, November 5: Rams. Rams Directed by Grímur Hákonarson…
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, opening November 6 in local theaters, details how the Boston Globe uncovered the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal in 2002. The newspaper’s work won major awards, and the film is now being prepped for Oscar reception, getting talked up almost everywhere as a serious film. (But then, so was…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s twenty-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play like One Third of a Nation, one of the Living Newspaper extravaganzas mounted with New Deal funding by the Federal Theatre Project, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights the opening night feature, Anomalisa, and offers a preview of the…
The Oscar-winning screenwriter whose exploits are the subject of the upcoming biopic Trumbo, opening November 6 across the region, would be the first to snort at the thought of his life becoming Hollywood fodder. Then he would take the money and write the script himself. In recent years, Dalton Trumbo…
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev…
The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
Yes, it’s 3-D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic-strip masterpiece…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale-gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond picture…
T The John Cassavetes Award, established in 1989 in collaboration with Cassavetes’s widow, Gena Rowlands, is presented annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the world of filmmaking and whose work reflects the spirit of the late filmmaker. The award was first presented to Steven Soderberg;…
Out with the creeps and crawlies of October: November opens the floodgates to all those movies you’ll see advertised as “The Best Film of the Year!” To counter all those new, end-of-the-year releases from the studios, our favorite repertory houses have come up with some great programming of classics and…
After October ends, the next holiday on the calendar is Thanksgiving — and there are many reasons to be thankful for being a geek here in Denver. November may lack the nerd cred of October — Thanksgiving is a pale substitute for Halloween, even if you include an MST3K Turkey Day…
