Now Showing

Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…

Martha Marcy May Marlene is an old-school psycho thriller

As taut and economical as its title is unwieldy, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene — a first feature that won the Best Director award last January at Sundance — is a deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories…

Swedish documentary The Black Power Mixtape tells it like it was

The revolution will not be televised.” So Gil Scott-Heron asserted in 1970, and so it was not — at least not on American TV. As demonstrated by The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, however, Swedish television was another story. Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary assembled by…

Now Showing

Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…

Blackthorn should tickle Butch Cassidy and Western fans

Riffing on how outlaw Butch Cassidy’s life might have gone had he survived in South America, this modest oater should tickle Western fans. (I assume there are a few of us left.) Blackthorn finds Cassidy (Sam Shepard) still in Bolivia, breeding horses, bedding his Indian housekeeper (Magaly Solier) and making…

The Rum Diary will leave you with just a slight hangover

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, The Rum Diary is what the Brits might call a rum movie — an oddly inoffensive piece and a personal project for its disconcertingly unengaged star Johnny Depp. The movie adapts a novel Hunter S. Thompson began in the early ’60s and published, under…

Top ten Twilight Zone references in pop culture

The groundbreaking sci-fi series The Twilight Zone is still socially relevant, and it’s also inspired much social satire since it first appeared on television sets in 1959. The homage and spoofs range from many Simpsons episodes to a Melvins song to the Theater Company of Lafayette’s Return to the Twilight…

Five socially relevant episodes of The Twilight Zone

Over half a century after Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone first aired, people are still captivated by the sci-fi show. So in advance of the Theater Company of Lafayette’s production of Return to the Twilight Zone (Volume 8), A Parody, which opens tomorrow night at the Mary Miller Theater ,…

Now Showing

Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…

Despite Isabelle Huppert’s presence, Special Treatment is disheartening

Isabelle Huppert’s cerebral, prickly, glacial screen presence — which she has calibrated throughout her career to portray gorgeously complex women — is never less than magnetic. That’s why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep…

Wall Street financial-collapse tale Margin Call is too late to succeed

Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freakout. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…

In Take Shelter, a mental apocalypse is filtered through a marriage

Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…

Now Showing

Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…

Finding Joe documents the life of the late Joseph Campbell

There’s much to savor in director Patrick Takaya Solomon’s documentary Finding Joe, about the life — but mainly the work — of the late Joseph Campbell, iconic scholar of myths from around the world. (He coined Oprah’s favorite phrase, “Find your bliss.”) The film isn’t meant to be just an…