Here are some of the triumphant moments of recent history that make it into the climactic montage in America, the latest “America’s perfect!”/”America’s doomed!” pant load from felonious troll Dinesh D’Souza: Jackie Robinson rounding home. Elvis Presley swinging his hips. Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall. Boxed copies of Windows…
If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’s Third Person, a drama where grownups scream and cry and kiss for reasons that are confounding even to those who understand speech. The film follows a handful of couples, or, really,…
How has there not already been a Nicolas Cage movie called Rage? That title could fit many of the Drive Angry star’s late-career time-wasters. Here it works best as an imperative rather than an announcement of theme: You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you…
July is a perfect time to bask under the stars at one of Denver’s many outdoor screenings or to cuddle up in an air-conditioned theater and get out of the heat. This month’s picks for movie events include throw-back classics, one queer festival and two killer new releases. See also:…
Denver Public Library’s Chris Loffelmacher wants people to see the DPL as “a community gathering spot where citizens can be with their ‘tribe.’ That has always been a goal of libraries, but it has become more and more important in the age of social media. We want to give our…
This Saturday, Channel Z is bringing one of the strangest buddy comedies of all time to the Alamo Drafthouse. Frank Henenlotter’s horror comedy Basket Case is the tale of a country bumpkin named Duane and his horrifically deformed “twin,” Belial. After his little, creepy conjoined buddy is forcibly removed, Duane…
On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…
Coloradans like to celebrate their state almost as much as they like to live in it. Longmont’s second annual Front Range Film Fest, running Thursday through Saturday, “Connects the Front Range to Film,” with three feature-length films and a series of shorts, most of which are by local filmmakers. “Our…
In January 2013, an incandescently brilliant American political activist and computer programmer named Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by the overzealous U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz. Anyone who argues differently has a desk drawer full of government pay stubs. Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of…
Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and, boy, it’d…
Although it’s full of information, the documentary Ivory Tower at its core poses a question: Is the price of college worth it? The film touches on a host of issues beyond finances, including the party culture at some schools, the unique value of historically black colleges, and experimentation with online…
Gildersleeve, Balas, Bumiller, Judd. Commanding the large front spaces at Robischon Gallery is Allison Gildersleeve: Within Earshot, which includes a selection of paintings in which the artist employs the methods of abstract expressionism but uses them to convey representational subjects. In the small space beyond the Gildersleeves is Jack Balas:…
Believe it or not, during Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s fourth rattling of the toy box, I felt one moment of near transcendence. Three-fourths of the way through the punishing 165-minute runtime—and fifteen minutes after my seatmate took off her 3-D glasses in exhaustion—my brain left my body, crying…
From the 1970s through the late 1990s, Utah’s Jeff Lowe was one of climbing’s guiding lights, setting new standards for light-and-fast alpinism with ascents in the Himalayas and Alps and helping to establish the sport of modern mixed climbing with his efforts in the mountains of Colorado.. Now 63, Lowe…
Give Of Montreal’s back catalogue even a casual listen and you’ll find a little bit of everything — glam rock, disco, psychedelia and pure pop — sometimes all crammed into the same song. The band’s main man, Kevin Barnes, is a complex and contradictory figure, creating everything from obscure characters,…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys on stage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed, and overbearing. And…
For all of Fox News’s fear-mongering about Hollywood being out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident or carries it to term. Abortion, an option…
In 2012, advocates for marijuana legalization pushed Initiative 502 onto the ballot in Washington state. This year, director Riley Morton released the documentary Evergreen: The Road to Legalization, which chronicles the months leading up to the vote. In interviews with recreational and medical marijuana users, dealers and legislators, as well…
Chris Richter. Back in March, gallery director Bobbi Walker realized that her planned June slot had come apart and that she needed to come up with somebody fast. At the time, she was checking out the scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and came across the work of painter Chris…
“Wherever you live in this world, basically…you are alone. Even if have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis…
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…
