Nine years on from her intoxicating road-movie debut, Somersault, Australian director Cate Shortland has fashioned a different kind of journey — this one set amid the winding trails of the Bavarian woods, circa 1945. There the five children of a captured Nazi officer flee toward what they hope is safety…
It’s a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar — also the name of the ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging Disney tent pole, a…
It’s a cliché of the voting world that even the staunchest liberals — especially of the privileged, male variety — tend to drift rightward through middle age and beyond. Yesterday’s protesters develop the libertarian malaise; its progressives seek to fence in their fiefdoms and tax-proof their stock portfolios. Not so…
Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…
When a 1974 demo tape was discovered of music by Death, the Detroit proto-punks, it was like a missing link. Ahead of its time and now all but forgotten, the trio’s harsh, fast sound was the precursor to that of bands like Bad Brains, Ramones and Minutemen. A Band Called…
The ’90s don’t get a lot of cinematic respect. Apart from a handful of acknowledged classics, film fans tend to overlook work from the rest of the decade. And that’s a shame, because while the ’90s might not be on the radar for a lot of cinemaphiles, there are plenty…
As with past editions, this year’s third annual Women + Film Voices Film Festival aligns with the celebration of International Women’s Day — which is Friday, March 8. Curated by festival producer Tammy Brislin, FilmCenter artistic director Brit Withey and festival director Britta Erickson, narratives and documentaries alike get top…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
With his fluttery falsetto and haughty gaze, Ruben, the flamboyantly gay, ambivalently Jewish twenty-something hero of the new French comedy Let My People Go!, is the kind of big-screen character usually relegated to the sidelines. It’s refreshing to see him front and center, gamely played by Nicolas Maury, gangly limbs…
To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook…
The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. But for many viewers, that isn’t the case in the four films chronicling the arrest, conviction, and eighteen-year incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin for a crime they didn’t commit. The crime-scene photos of three young…
Honestly, when it started six years ago, Californication was provocative, ballsy and fun, with laugh-out-loud dialogue and plenty of smart musings about love, sex, family and responsibility. Over five seasons, anti-hero Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has drank and fucked his way through a series of Hollywood writing jobs, all the…
Guy humor is always with us, kind of like the poor. For as long as cavemen have been etching fart jokes into the walls of caves, women have been rolling their eyes, as they didn’t yet have the language tools to whip up outraged essays for Jezebel. Still, given the…
In 1965, a southern Colorado community known as Drop City was born when a collective of artists from Boulder and Lawrence, Kansas, settled on a seven-acre plot just outside of Trinidad. With a desire to establish a non-ideological creative community whose physical structures — modeled on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic-dome style…
MTV’s hit show Made held a private audition on the Auraria campus Monday. There were around seventy brave souls in the waiting area on the third floor of the Tivoli, outside one of the ballrooms, patiently waiting their turn to spill their hearts out in hopes of being made. We…
When River Phoenix died, in October 1993, he was three weeks from completing his performance in Dark Blood, an $8 million indie film that had already seen five weeks of shooting on location in southern Utah. In this lurid modern film noir, Phoenix was cast as “Boy,” a mysterious part-Hopi…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
Why is there evil in the world?” That question and its corollaries — Where does evil come from? Why can so many create and commit it with apparent immunity? — are at the core of the film Bless Me, Ultima, whose seven-year-old hero, Antonio, wrestles with riddles that have likely…
Depending on your perspective, Zooey Deschanel is either the cutest, funniest, most adorable little retro-kookster on earth, or she’s an irritating try-hard with zero comedy chops. The only thing the world seems able to universally agree on is that Deschanel has nice bangs. As such, her sitcom — New Girl,…
When you think of the Civil Rights Movement, you likely think of Martin Luther King Jr. — for good reason. The role he played was monumental — and because of that, monuments have been erected, pages in textbooks set aside and a national holiday named in his honor. So much…
With its bizarre onslaught of sentient drugs, invisible aliens and time-tripping insanity, Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End (opening tonight at the Sie FilmCenter) is like no film you’ve seen before. Adapted from David Wong’s debut novel of the same name, John puts the fate of reality — not…
The Boulder International Film Festival opens tonight with Muscle Shoals and continues through the weekend with three more days of independent cinema, symposiums and events featuring special guests from all over the world. It can be tricky to pick films from the festival’s extensive schedule, so we asked co-founders Kathy…
