Denver’s Home Grown Nature extends with an excellent start to the 2025 DIFF
With Sundance’s new home set for 2027 in Boulder, Denver’s 48 years of film had something to prove. From its early years, the Tivoli Theater and now the SIE on Colfax, the Denver Film Festival has become a key component of the City’s vitality, culture, and community. The majors are blended with the upstarts. A full house at a classic like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive could be found at most screening locations, including the Botanic Gardens, the Holiday Theater, and, of course, at Elle Caulkins. On view, audiences should have had plenty to chime in on and savor.
Man on the Run: A film Robert Frank, Kerouac, and Ginsberg would relish
With the story about Paul McCartney’s life post-Beatles, the locals were able to reconnect with why Denver played a role not just in how the British invasion took hold in the Rockies but how McCartney’s exploration with his band Wings carried him to the top of the charts. Wings sold out shows across America and beyond. To reach an all-time high, “Man on the Run” delved into Paul’s struggles, lows to highs, and how his unique sound transformed from the ’60s through the ’80s. Friendships and love found and tragically lost, built more than WINGS for McCartney. His voice, melodies, and words remain transcendent to this day, uniquely his own.
Unquestionable: Rental Family
Brendan Fraser in RENTAL FAMILY. Photo by James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The early winner for the 48th edition at Denver Film will ultimately be Rental Family, starring Brendon Fraser (The Whale, The Scout, and Killers of the Flower Moon). Few films can wrap an audience with all emotions. When multiple theater goers can go from extreme highs and laughter to unbelievable tears and introspection, the script and performance have woven a film as the best. This film’s message ring’s loud for so many isolated soles on our complex planet. Meaning, purpose, truth, trust, and love permeate from Tokyo and cultural confluences in Rental Family.
The First International Tribunal: Nuremberg
Russell Crowe in character for Nuremberg – The Film. Courtesy: Sony Pictures.
In keeping with Denver’s consistent ability to be an International film’s testing ground, Russell Crowe’s portrayal as the washed-up, captured, and ultimately convicted Nazi war criminal, Hermann Wilhelm Göring, takes life in the made-for-Hollywood film Nuremberg. Understanding the psychology behind such evil (evil we still confront in today’s wars and society) is loosely explored as Crowe interacts with co-stars, including Rami Malik.
Given the significance of true genocides, the death of over 6 million Jews at the hands of Goring’s Fascist Germany, Nuremberg resonates. It does so because the current global framework for international laws applied to war and war criminals is front and center. These laws were formed by the significance of the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946). The failings of today’s ICC, where political manipulation by states like South Africa or judges focused on personal vs. global interests, become apparent in this version of Nuremberg (#NurembergFilm).
Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945 by Margaret Bourke-White, © Time-Life, Inc
The script connects how the victors revealed to the world the methodical and planned killings of a targeted population. Hitler’s Germany did so as part of its goal to rise up from the burdens of Versailles and rule globally. Fortunately, the film highlights how the press and propaganda work against a functioning world based on fair and just laws.
What resonates is how the Allied forces planned to bring justice upon the war’s end. American and British lawyers spoke for the victors (Russia of course was part of the actual process begun at Yalta). Turning the Nuremberg Palace of Justice into a unified voice against human inhumanity remains a necessary lesson for the founding Allies (“The Big Four”).
While some (like Grok AI) want to question the importance of referencing actual Holocaust camp footage, this version of Nuremberg for film effectively reminds us all of what terror, genocide, and the will to find justice against such evil takes for humanity to prevail. This film wins for those who have forgotten the importance and reasons for justice. The hangman’s gallows was too mild, clearly for the evil that Nazi Germany left in its aftermath. This film is for all the “useful idiots” needing a visual reminder of why a pluralistic Democratic way of life matters at times of darkness.
Showtimes for the Denver International Film Festival continue through November 9th, 2025.
