A sketchy trifle of French animation grabbing time in theaters thanks to its recent Oscar nomination, Felicioli and Gagnol’s barely-hour-long film A Cat in Paris seeks shelf space beside Sylvain Chomet’s deft and rapturous hand-drawn cartoons (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist), and the required self-conscious Frenchiness is spot-on. But…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
This morning Forge Motion Pictures and Carbondale-based filmmaker Skip Armstrong premiered The Shapeshifter online, the third installment in Armstrong’s five-part Of Souls + Water series profiling paddlers of every stripe and their relationships with the water that connects each of them…
Colorado skateboarders in Colorado don’t need an official holiday to put wheels to pavement: after all, there are 159 skate parks statewide and eight more in development. But last Thursday’s international Go Skateboarding Day celebration still made for a good excuse. The first video from the local festivities is Royal…
Bryan Nash Gill. The front space at Goodwin Fine Art is filled with an installation by nationally known Connecticut artist Bryan Nash Gill, who uses wood as both his material and his method. Nash has created two cubes made of cut-up pine beams. One, left in its natural color, has…
Apocalypse movies are a venerable enough genre (and reliable box-office cash spigots) to support a few lightweight, funny-sad-romantic entries every once in a while. Given the right touch, this approach can be just the antidote to the idea-free, effects-laden blockbusters and art-house pity parties that dominate the form; it’s conceivable…
With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s thirteenth feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a pint-sized Florence Welch. Despite these resemblances, Merida remains an original: Brave, set in the Scottish Highlands in the tenth century, is the animation studio’s first film with a female…
A blanket of white covers Montreal inside and out in Monsieur Lazhar, the understated, affecting Canadian drama recently nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. The schoolyard where Alice (Sophie Nélisse) and Simon (Émilien Néron) exchange their usual morning jabs is capped with snow, and their classroom is filled with…
The rug monster is coming back to life. In 1964, the monster — which, BTW, looks like a combination penis-and-vagina — was the star of the (terrible) monster movie The Creeping Terror. Now, thanks to more than $70,000 raised through Kickstarter, a brand-new version of the rug monster will grace…
The official start of summer is still a week away, but for film fans it really begins tonight at Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder, when the Chautauqua Silent Film Series kicks off its 27th year. In a long-standing collaboration with the Silent Film Trio, Hank Troy and the Mont-Alto Motion Picture…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Boulder-based filmmaker Hunter Weeks is bringing his new film, Where the Yellowstone Goes, to the Denver FilmCenter tonight at 7 p.m.; the screening will be followed by a Q&A session. Weeks and his crew — including his wife, Sarah Hall, and Denver-based filmmaker Mike Dion, a frequent collaborator — spent…
Set in the Norwegian boonies, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first fiction feature (based on Olaug Nilssen’s 2005 novel) introduces its fifteen-year-old protagonist, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), with her hand down her pants, furiously coming as she listens to a phone-sex operator. Yet the opening scene’s promising boldness is soon undermined by cutaway…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated as a stage production, first…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes, and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell-hot. But in an unusual twist for a twentysomething performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress — she hasn’t yet…
The Tour Divide is a harrowing bike race. And that’s true even if you don’t have diabetes. The 2,745 mile race follows the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico and challenges racers to complete the distance unsupported by anyone else and living off the food and…
“If you could ride anywhere in the world, where would you go?” became a central question for Mike Dion after the success of the Denver-based filmmaker’s 2010 film, Ride the Divide. That question became the tagline for his next film, Reveal the Path, which took Dion and some of the…
Tonight at 7 p.m., filmmakers Allie Bombach and Sarah Menzies will show the first two films in their MoveShake series online at www.MoveShake.org. The MoveShake films profile people pushing for environmental and social change; Breckenridge-based Shannon Galpin, who founded Mountain2Mountain, an organization aimed at “creating education and opportunity for women…
It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle, leaving behind a…
It’s a warm spring evening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, and the crowd jostling for hors d’oeuvre in the lobby of the Paramount Theater exudes the anticipatory hum of a gala studio premiere. Only tonight’s feature presentation isn’t a new summer blockbuster or year-end prestige release. Rather, it’s…
You like the idea of those outdoor screenings where folks lounge around on lawn chairs and watch movies under the stars, but you’re not so thrilled with the usual titles, which are mostly family-friendly second-runs of the lowest common denominator, or cult favorites you’ve seen hundreds of times. But now,…
