Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential, in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine Alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true, and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss and Topher…
Thirty-six-year-old Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, the writer-director and star of the comedy Nasty Baby, is himself an enfant terrible. In eight years he’s made six eclectic films, his own wicked twists disguised in what looked like the usual arthouse tropes. The Maid, his American breakthrough, looked like a benign Latin…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an off-screen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
Lenny Abrahamson’s shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism. Seven years ago, Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) snatched seventeen-year-old Joy (Brie Larson) and stashed her in his backyard shed. Two years later, she bore their son. The door stayed locked. Now five, Jack…
Die-hard Rocky Horror fans got the full treatment when Colorado’s Elusive Ingredient stage re-enactors did the Time Warp again at Saturday night’s screening of the campy cult classic. Photographer Brandon Marshall caught these pics of all the fun. ]Now see the full Rocky Horror Picture Show slide show. …
In the fall of 1991, Jennifer “JP” McPherson was putting on her makeup and rounding up the Transylvanians for their midnight production at <em>The Rocky Horror Picture Show</em> at the Esquire Theatre. She was the cast manager for the troupe and was about to take the stage as a very pregnant…
Start lining up your favorite babysitter, packing to-go meals and stocking up on eyedrops, because tickets for the 38th annual Denver Film Festival, which runs from November 4 through November 15, are officially on sale today. This year’s schedule, which boasts over 250 films from 39 different countries, is a…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
Sherlock Holmes is the most popular character in English literature, and the one most frequently portrayed in film history. More than seventy actors have played him in over 200 films and radio and TV series. Sometimes it seems that any actor in need of a hit just throws on an…
Adventurer, survivalist and outdoor guru Bear Grylls is the star of Running Wild with Bear Grylls, now in its second season with NBC. On each episode, viewers watch Grylls take A-list celebrities, TV stars and even a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Drew Brees, into untamed and untouched areas around the globe for a…
Where will you be at 4:29 p.m. on October 21, 2015? To legions of Back to the Future fans all over globe, that’s the exact time and date when Doc Brown and Marty McFly zoom into the future in Back to the Future II, the first sequel in the cult-favorite…
Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour, and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…
Completing a trifecta of recent cinema suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never makes the same movie twice, toggling from Pixelvision experiment…
Why would a world-renowned philosopher come to Denver to talk at a free screening of an old film noir? “When I talk about German philosophers, people tend to tune out. When I talk about movies, I get a much better reception,” says Robert Pippin, a Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche expert at…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay, and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to explain to his mom, whom he’ll be living with…
We’re in the spooky season, full of haunted houses, zombie crawls, scary movies — and next year could be even spookier. The announcement trailer for Friday the 13th: The Game was just released, and it hypes what looks like the scariest survival horror game yet, coming next fall. The asymmetrical multiplayer…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
A lot of ink (most of it negative) has been spilled discussing the cinematic oeuvre of Tyler Perry, whose gospel-infused morality tales leave critics cold but do so well with audiences that they’ve afforded Perry the chance to be an auteur — a creative who has absolute control over every…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…
