Arts & Life

Three different times at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, I saw the kinds of films that are so potent you forget everything you’ve seen before. One was Kelly Reichardt’s sweetly named First Cow; another was The Human Factor, a documentary about the endlessly frustrating attempts at Palestinian/Israeli peace negotiations, and the third was A Hidden Life by the enigmatic Terrence Malick. Any one of these movies would make my eight-hour one-way drive to Telluride worth the trouble, but to get all three is close to miraculous.

Tel Aviv on Fire is and isn’t a comedy. As viewers around the world have mentioned, it’s hard to make a comedy about something serious. The bravest attempt ever is the 1942 To Be or Not To Be, by the great Ernst Lubitsch, about the Nazi invasion of Poland, and made during the war. It comes off a lot funnier now than it did at the time. Tel Aviv on Fire, about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict goes down easier than To Be or Not To Be must have back in 1942, but I doubt that it will ever look so funny.

All summer, the Campus Commons Gallery at the University of Northern Colorado has been under wraps. The windows are papered over with old drawings, black and white photos of atomic mushroom clouds and vintage newspaper articles decrying "Doom Town Wiped Out By Mighty Atom Bomb."

It's been drawing a lot of attention to the gallery's upcoming exhibition, said Pam Campanaro, UNC's director of galleries. The space itself has been kept under lock and key. Only Campanaro and the artists and crew have been allowed into the space.

You can blame this review on Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is the one long-dead filmmaker whom just about nobody thinks is either from the olden days or out of date. One reason that many people continue to watch such Hitchcock films as The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo, or Rear Window is that Hitchcock always knew that story must be visual. Characters must not tell the story or describe who they are. They should be the story. Hitchcock characters do what they do – and what they don’t do is tell the audience what’s going on. It’s up to the filmmaker to shape what characters say and do into a story for the audience to understand.

One of the biggest projects in sculptor Jane DeDecker's career is happening now because of something that didn't happen last year.

DeDecker was a finalist for the Monumental Women's Statue project in New York City — Central Park's first historical sculpture depicting a woman. Artists were asked to submit designs for a monument honoring Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, pioneers of the suffragette movement.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish diplomat who became Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953. Some called him a compromise candidate who was considered harmless, but over his time at the UN he was active and effective, until he died in a plane crash on September 18, 1961 in Ndola, Zambia, then known as Rhodesia. Ever since then, there’s been wonder about that crash, and now Swedish filmmaker Mads Brügger with investigator Göran Björkdahl have made a film about the event and many things connected to it.

Luz comes billed as a horror film, but what gets under your skin has nothing to do with monsters roaring out of the basement, or down from outer space, -- or sudden loud sounds. And it’s not even any events in its story. What digs into the psyche comes more from the overall picture of a world that’s unreliable, but far too orderly, and sounds that are both repetitious and unnerving.

A giant shoe box has popped up on Denver's 16th Street Mall across from Union Station. Inside are more than 30 pairs of shoes — along with recorded stories from those who walked in them.

The project is part of the Biennial of the Americas Festival exhibit "A Mile in My Shoes" where you can literally try on someone else's shoes while listening to their story.