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…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three thirteen-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
There’s much to be astonished by in the story of how the Supreme Court was goaded in slapping down Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban. One of the most surprising: that in courtroom after courtroom, be it state, district or superior, Charles Cooper and the proponents of the ban never…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
We leave the movie theater on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast in favor of a longform interview with Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who’s been at the New York paper for about a year. Before that she wrote for Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone and the Boston Phoenix,…
Though it has been a few years since filmmaker Scout Wise produced her silent film Stan Needs a Maid, the Denver native is proudly part of a group of once-student filmmakers who will be showcasing their work tonight on CPT 12. Now working in the Bay Area as an associate…
When world-renowned banjo player Béla Fleck was commissioned to write his first banjo concerto, he knew it would be a long, deep and challenging experience. The master musician decided to film the yearlong journey, and the result is Béla Fleck: How to Write a Banjo Concerto, a very personal look…
Three people get lost in a strange new world where mystery and danger abound. In the process of figuring out how to return home to the real world, they will uncover a secret that puts the fate of not just the planet, but perhaps the entire universe, at stake. That’s…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
One of the biggest selling points of 21 Jump Street, the 2012 TV-remake comedy, turned out to be its seemingly unscripted lunacy, the way it put Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in police-shorts outfits and let them riff on their characters’ mutual ineptitude. As undercover cops who pose as teenagers…
There’s still one kind of dread that today’s genre filmmakers can reliably stir up: that everything we’ve been watching on screen is going to be upended by some last-minute twist, that all the clues and portents we’ve puzzled over will be swept away in favor of some revelation so big…
The most radical thing about this eco-terrorism drama is its quiet patience and formal vigor. While most studio pictures slap together their images with all the care of a grocery-store deli clerk assembling the ham and carrots on a cheap-o party platter, Kelly Reichardt, the director of Night Moves, favors…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
