FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Denver Film Media Contacts:
Marty Schechter: marty@schechterpr.com
Keith Garcia: keith@denverfilm.org
(JANUARY GIALLO assets link, JANUS FOR JANUARY assets link)
DENVER – Dec 23, 2024 – Denver Film today announced two repertory film series for January 2025, one highlighting 11 newly restored film classics by Janus Films – the incubator for The Criterion Collection – called Janus for January. The second celebrates the Italian horror subgenre Giallo – called January Giallo – a Denver Film/Sie FilmCenter tradition beginning in 2022. The films will screen exclusively at Denver Film’s year-round home the Sie FilmCenter, 2510 E. Colfax, throughout January.
“The January chill often leads to a slowdown at the movies but we’re infusing some heat into our programming to keep things creative and cozy” said Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director, Keith Garcia. “Hitting our screens first is January Giallo and, with the curating prowess of myself and our partners Scream Screen and L.A.’s Cinematic Void, we’re excited for the four selections that exemplify the Giallo sub-genre whether from Italy, France or even American. Our viewers have gone wild for this series since we started and we certainly don’t want to disappoint. For Janus for January we were so busy at the Sie this year that we had no room to play these amazing restorations but with Janus literally being the root of the word January, the month was practically perfect to pay tribute to this company that puts so much into restoring and revitalizing these amazing classics films and insuring their presence for decades to come.”
The full schedule and tickets are on sale now at denverfilm.org. Ticket prices range from $12 – $15 for General Admission with deeper discounts available to Denver Film Members.
TORSO
Director: Sergio Martino
Saturday, January 4, 7 p.m.
A masked serial killer with psychosexual issues strangles female coeds with scarves before dismembering them. When a wealthy student identifies one of the scarves and thinks she has a lead on a suspect, she becomes the killer’s next target, retreating to her family’s remote cliffside villa with three of her girlfriends.
Cinematic Void’s Jim Branscome IN-PERSON
VALENTINE
Director: Jamie Blanks
Saturday, January 11, 7 p.m.
Four friends start to receive morbid Valentine cards and realise they are being stalked by someone they had spurned 13 years ago. A masked killer is on the loose and Valentine’s day is soon approaching.
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE
Director: Mario Bava
Saturday, January 18, 7 p.m.
Isabella, a young model, is murdered by a mysterious masked figure at a fashion house in Rome. When her diary, which details the house employees’ many vices, disappears, the masked killer begins killing off all the models in and around the house to find it.
Scream Screen’s Theresa Mercado IN-PERSON
KNIFE+HEART – Presented on 35mm film
Director: Yann Gonzalez
Saturday, January 25, 7 p.m.
In the summer of 1979, gay porn producer Anne (Vanessa Paradis) sets out to film her most ambitious film yet, but her actors are picked off, one by one, by a mysterious killer.
Scream Screen’s Theresa Mercado IN-PERSON
LE SAMOURAÏ
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Sunday, January 5, 12 p.m.
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.
SEVEN SAMURAI
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Tuesday, January 7, 6 p.m.
One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.
BASQUIAT – BLACK & WHITE VERSION
Director: Julian Schnabel
Saturday, January 11, 12 p.m.
No painter electrified the 1980s art scene like Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York street kid whose visionary blending of expressionism, pop art, and the radical new aesthetics of hip-hop and graffiti propelled him to international fame before a tragic early demise. Julian Schnabel’s stunning debut charts Basquiat’s dizzying rise and fall with an insider’s eye for authentic details of the downtown arts demimonde as well as a fellow postmodernist’s interest in the dream-like and surreal. Jeffrey Wright’s brilliant introductory performance provides trenchant insight into the artist’s creative passions and personal demons. Cemented by David Bowie as a spot-on Andy Warhol, Basquiat’s supporting cast is a murderers’ row of Hollywood legends and art lovers (Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Benicio del Toro, Parker Posey, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe) lending their talents to one of the high points of 90s independent cinema, an intimate elegy for a once-in-a-generation artistic phenomenon.
QUERELLE
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Sunday, January 12, 12 p.m.
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is a deliriously stylized tale of hothouse lust and simmering violence. Set amid an expressionistic soundstage vision of a French sea port, this daring adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet recounts the tragedy of a handsome sailor (Brad Davis) as he is drawn into a vortex of sibling rivalry, murder, and explosive sexuality. Completed just before Fassbinder’s sudden death at age thirty-seven, QUERELLE finds the director pushing his embrace of artifice and taboo-shattering depiction of queer desire to new extremes.
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
Director: Jacques Demy
Tuesday, January 14, 12 p.m. and 7 p.m.
An angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through the lilting songs of the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
THE TIME MASTERS
Director: René Laloux
Friday, January 17, 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, January 18, 12 p.m.
Directed by visionary science-fiction animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet) and designed by the legendary Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius) The Time Masters is a visually fantastic foray into existentialist space adventure. After his parents are killed on the dangerous planet Perdide, young Piel (voiced by Frédéric Legros) survives by maintaining radio contact with Jaffar (Jean Valmont), a pilot transporting the exiled Prince Matton (Yves-Marie Maurin) and Princess Belle (Monique Thierry) from their former kingdom. Jaffar seeks the help of Silbad (Michel Elias), a cheerful old-timer who knows how to circumvent Perdide’s hazards, including brain-devouring insects and watery graves. Along the way, Jaffar and company encounter a pair of impish homunculi stowaways, identity-less angels controlled by an amorphous hive mind, and the Masters of Time, mysterious beings who can bend reality and perhaps reveal to the heroes their secret origins and destinies.
PRESSURE
Director: Horace Ové
Sunday, January 19, 12 p.m.
Horace Ové’s fiction-film debut marks a watershed in the history of British cinema: the nation’s first feature to be written and directed by a Black filmmaker and the first to focus on the perspective of Black characters. Ové and novelist Sam Selvon’s gritty script centers on teenage Tony (Herbert Norville), caught between his Trinidadian parents’ (Lucita Lijertwood and Frank Singuineau) desire to attain middle-class respectability in London and his older brother Colin’s (Oscar James) urging to join the Black Power movement. After encountering racism while hanging out with a white girl and searching for employment, Tony finds comradeship with a group of aimless Caribbean boys, only to discover that their petty criminality is a dead end. Ové depicts Tony’s subsequent political awakening in captivating vérité style as he realizes that taking on the system will invite not only violent police oppression but also a thorough examination of his own values and beliefs. Suffused with the political outrage and explosive rebellion of 1970s London, Pressure is a marvel of lived-in independent filmmaking that captures Black working-class solidarity while refusing easy solutions to social problems—like income disparity, juvenile delinquency, racial profiling—that remain relevant today.
THE WAGES OF FEAR
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Tuesday, January 21, 7 p.m.
In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive cargo to a faraway oil fire, each bump and jolt tests their courage, their friendship, and their nerves. The result is one of the greatest thrillers ever committed to celluloid, a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.
SHOESHINE
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Saturday, January 25, 12 p.m.
One of the greatest achievements in the cinematic revolution known as Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine stands as a timeless masterpiece of trenchant social observation and stirring emotional humanism. In postwar Rome, street kids Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) shine the shoes of American servicemen in hopes of saving enough money to purchase a beautiful horse. But when Giuseppe’s criminal brother tricks them into participating in a confidence scam, the duo are arrested and then ground through the merciless gears of the juvenile detention system until their once-unbreakable friendship becomes the first casualty in an inexorable sequence of tragic events. Scripted by an all-star team of screenwriters (led by neorealist legend Cesare Zavattini), and directed by De Sica with an uncompromising eye for the period’s singular personalities and harsh conditions, Shoeshine is filmmaking at its most soulful, urgent, and heartbreakingly beautiful.
PANDORA’S BOX
Director: G.W. Pabst
Sunday, January 26, 12 p.m.
One of the masters of early German cinema, G. W. Pabst had an innate talent for discovering actresses (including Greta Garbo). And perhaps none of his female stars shone brighter than Kansas native and onetime Ziegfeld girl Louise Brooks, whose legendary persona was defined by Pabst’s lurid, controversial melodrama Pandora’s Box. Sensationally modern, the film follows the downward spiral of the fiery, brash, yet innocent showgirl Lulu, whose sexual vivacity has a devastating effect on everyone she comes in contact with. Daring and stylish, Pandora’s Box is one of silent cinema’s great masterworks and a testament to Brooks’s dazzling individuality.
PARIS, TEXAS
Director: Wim Wenders
Tuesday, January 28, 7 p.m.
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
About Denver Film
Denver Film has been transforming and entertaining the Colorado community through the power of diverse voices in film since 1978. Operating as the region’s only membership-based, 501(c)(3) nonprofit film institution, Denver Film has grown into a signature cultural organization in the West, screening international and independent movies found nowhere else in the region.
Serving more than 100,000 patrons annually through 600-plus screenings that include year-round programming at Denver Film’s flagship home the Sie (pronounced SEE) FilmCenter, the annual Denver Film Festival celebration, the iconic Film on the Rocks program at Red Rocks Amphitheater, and Spotlight Festivals including CinemaQ, Women+Film, and the Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival. Spotlights highlight underrepresented communities and foster inclusivity. Denver Film works to build resilience across all of its programming and events by amplifying diverse voices, promoting equity, and fostering community connections.
For more information or to explore the full suite of Denver Film programming, events, and ticketing visit: denverfilm.org.
