It’s been 40 years since the original Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George was released, and in the updated version being released tonight, rural England has been replaced with the South, giving the whole thing a red state vs. blue state feel from the start. It’s also kind…
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,…
Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast), The Last Circus is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes Pan’s Labyrinth look like Sesame Street. In the middle of the…
As stripped down and propulsive as its robotic title, Drive is the most “American” movie yet by Danish genre director Nicolas Winding Refn. The film, for which Refn was named Best Director last May in Cannes, is a sleek, tense piece of work that, as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling,…
What does it take to become the next big tech thing? Eleven start-ups will enter TechStars’ first New York City start-up incubator to find out if they have the smarts, the will and the ability to get cash in order to become the next high-tech sensation. TechStars, the Boulder-based technology…
Only an asshole gets killed for a car (the Repo Code). The International Film Series at the University of Colorado in Boulder will show a series of films by director Alex Cox over the next few weeks; Cox teaches screenwriting and film production at the school. And while all of…
What I don’t know: why these movies keep getting made. I Don’t Know How She Does It is based on Allison Pearson’s 2002 diaristic, comic bestseller and directed by Douglas McGrath. But its real auteur is screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, scripter of wan workplace romantic comedies such as the limp…
With another new television season almost upon us, it’s also another season missing AMC’s Mad Men. The ’60s-era period drama, which has been on hiatus since October of last year due to negotiations between the network and creator Matthew Weiner, is now finally promising a return in March 2012. But…
The headline potential is almost too good to be true: A movie called The Worst Movie EVER! hauls in the worst opening-weekend box office ever, selling exactly one ticket for a total gross of $11. And yet it is true, and it happened to Glenn Berggoetz, a Metro State professor…
The 6th annual Reel Rock Film Tour kicks off on Thursday, September 15, at the Boulder Theater, featuring six of the year’s most intense climbing documentaries. This week, Boulder’s Sender Films and Reel Rock event promoter Big Up Productions released the 2011 lineup and a trailer featuring each of the…
Design for the Other 90%. This traveling exhibit from the Cooper-Hewitt in New York — the national design museum of the Smithsonian Institution — is being presented at RedLine, which is strange, as it relates more to technology than to art. Not only that, but it’s way too small for…
You know those Affliction shirts, covered in skulls, gothic lettering and tribal patterns, all cacophonous symbols of bad-ass machismo? That’s what the mixed martial arts tie-in movie Warrior is: an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fire sale of male-weepie tropes, awesome in its thoroughness. The collective dream of authentic blue-collar American grubbiness lives on…
Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh’s ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on day two of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an employee of an ominously unspecific multinational corporation who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like crap…
At one point in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s decades-spanning directorial debut, the actress, playing Corinne, a woman still soaked with lake water after her baptism into an evangelical sect, resembles no less a touchstone than Ronee Blakley in Robert Altman’s Nashville: slightly high hair; starchy, sexless, long tunic dress; swaying…
We generally try not to let our hipster cynicism and pessimism override us here at Show and Tell, but there’s no way around the truth of hindsight. Now that it’s September, and the official Summer movie season is over, we know: The tentpole Summer movies of 2011 sucked, and sucked…
Nobody is really a fan of Netflix’s rate increase, but if you’ve been holding off selling the children into slavery for the price hike, you might want to start hitting up Craigslist, because it’s about to hit you hard. Thankfully, you’ve probably still got a little time before your bank…
Joseph Coniff. This smart and at times extremely funny show, titled Joseph Coniff: This Is What It’s Like, highlights the efforts of an emerging conceptual artist. Coniff, who studied at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where he was a protegé of Clark “Drop City” Richert’s, is just…
The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott’s moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film’s co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto). En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge,…
A group of thirty-somethings trapped in the amber of their high-school years attempt to bone their way into adulthood in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, an ensemble sex comedy written and directed by Larry Sanders Show writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck. Technically, the orgy of the title is conceived…
It’s true that, as a kid, you generally have occasion to go to amusement parks more often, but it’s not until you are an adult that you get to go to them and drink booze — and that makes all the difference. Well, arguably the booze is just a way…
It’s no secret Denver has a love affair with film festivals, but if you’re looking to pack in a ton of films into a single night, there aren’t a whole lot of options. Thankfully, 38 Films is going down tonight at Casselman’s. It’s a collection of 38 films (duh) from…
Just over ten years ago, Golden-based mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer made history as the first blind man to make the summit on Mount Everest, then went on to complete the Seven Summits — the tallest peaks on each continent — in 2008. Weihenmayer, with the help of his friend Jeff…
