In hindsight, the 1984 hit Footloose — starring Kevin Bacon and directed by Herbert Ross — along with its contemporary, Flashdance, can be seen as the link between the old Hollywood model of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical, based on original songs brought to life in elaborate choreographed numbers, and the later…
The Mile High Horror Festival kicks off tomorrow night at the Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli, with more than thirty films being shown across three days on two different screens. While you can pick up a weekend pass to check out all the festivities, not everyone is going to have…
Buy a red car and find someone young and spry to liven up your life. That’s what most people would do when staring down the precipice of a life crisis. I applied for The Real World online. Last Tuesday I got an e-mail telling me that I was a very…
What’s the scariest thing about Colorado? The haunted mountain resorts? The cemeteries-turned-city parks? The escort-loving, meth-using pastors? All of those may soon be trumped by the second annual Mile High Horror Film Festival, which takes over the Tivoli Starz Film Center October 7 through October 9. With this year’s edition…
The things I remember about going to the circus as a child are limited, but they are awesome. I distinctly recall riding an elephant — though my parents do not — and only recently have I accepted the vegetarian guilt that comes with that potentially false memory. This was before…
Bonny Lhotka & Norman Epp. This duet, the full title of which is Horizons: Bonny Lhotka & Norman Epp, brings together the internationally known Boulder-based digital artist with an up-and-coming Denver sculptor. Though to a great extent their individual bodies of works have decidedly different aims — Lhotka is technically…
“Want it…and watch out,” ruthless corporate veep Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) instructs younger associate Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) in Love Crime, a silly tale of boardroom humiliation. The final film from Alain Corneau, who died last year and is best known for 1991’s All the Mornings of the World, Love Crime…
Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a two-bit trainer traveling the state-fair circuit in a not-too-distant future. His line is robot fighting, a sport that has absorbed the audience for boxing, MMA and, apparently, demolition derby. After a tough match leaves Charlie ‘bot-less, he gets news that his ex-girlfriend, with whom…
A procedural on the political manipulation of medium and message, George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort is bookended with scenes of media-op prepping. In the first, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney), fills in for his boss at the sound check for…
When Eddie Guerriero and Mitch Deprey began taping their neighbors’ drunken fights in 1987, they had no idea the tapes would become a cult phenomenon. But they did. Matthew Bate’s documentary Shut Up, Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (opening today at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax) chronicles the spread of the phenomenon,…
When we chatted with Keith Garcia, Denver FilmCenter’s Programming Manager, prior to last week’s showing of I Am Nancy, he told us a secret: Garcia promised that in honor of the film’s star, Heather Langenkamp — who came out to Denver for the screening to talk about her role as…
Bonny Lhotka & Norman Epp. This duet, the full title of which is Horizons: Bonny Lhotka & Norman Epp, brings together the internationally known Boulder-based digital artist with an up-and-coming Denver sculptor. Though to a great extent their individual bodies of works have decidedly different aims — Lhotka is technically…
I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you drive a wood chipper into the forest where dumb coeds are partying in the vicinity of suspicious hillbillies, that chipper must be used on human flesh. And so it is, though the intentions are decidedly reversed in Tucker & Dale…
One single scene captures the tricky tonal balance of Jonathan Levine’s cancer comedy 50/50. Adam, a straight-edge radio producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has just finished his first round of chemotherapy. It was tough, but the kindly gents IV’d next to him (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) made it…
While doing science last week, probably in an attempt to fit more tools into their army’s knives, the Swiss broke the Universe. They recorded Neutrinos, a shape-shifting subatomic particle known for sounding like an awesome breakfast cereal, moving faster than light. Now their hills are alive with the sound of…
One of the horror-film genre’s most iconic heroines, Heather Langenkamp (who played Nancy Thompson in the Nightmare on Elm Street series) kicked Freddy Kreuger’s ass not once, but three times. We spoke with the actor, who is in town for Denver Film Society’s The Watching Hour: An Evening With Heather…
The first ever Denver Silent Film Festival kicks off tonight at the King Center on the Auraria Campus. Silent films have long been out of style, unless you count muting a video on YouTube, which is why we decided to catch up with festival coordinator and presenter (and teacher and…
Tsui Hark’s visually sumptuous Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is a strong comeback for the veteran Hong Kong wuxia-maker. Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the…
At the time of this writing, the Oakland Athletics sit at a distant third in the American League West, eighteen games behind the Texas Rangers managed by Ron Washington, once the first-base coach under A’s wonderboy Billy Beane. The A’s have not had a winning season since making the playoffs…
John Sayles’s Amigo aspires to educate more than entertain, but it’s no less engrossing for that. Torn from the pages of history, if not those of Sayles’s recently published, epic turn-of-the-twentieth-century novel A Moment in the Sun, the movie harks back to America’s first real imperial adventure: the bloody pacification…
Drive, the film by Nicolas Winding Refn starring Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver so smooth you start to think he has some form of learning disability, is a perfect cinematic representation of “cool.” (Read our review of Drive) It oozes that shit, both in its underbelly of tone and…
Angela Larson and Michaele Keyes. The front space at Spark is usually subdivided into two rooms, but for the current pairing, the walls have been pushed back, and the combined area functions as a single gallery. Still, the two shows on display, Angela Larson: Vanishing and Michaele Keyes: Pursuing Motion,…
