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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Trollhunter is a mock doc that drains the magic out of troll-hunting

Alleged to be compiled of found college-project footage from a group of missing students, Trollhunter begins as an investigative report by aspiring Norwegian Michael Moores, trailing RV-driving loner Hans (Otto Jespersen). Suspected of bear poaching, Hans is revealed instead to be the field agent in a government conspiracy to cover…

Larry Crowne is middle-of-the-road

For a movie called Larry Crowne, it sure is tough to get a solid read on the character of Larry Crowne. Directed, co-written by and starring Tom Hanks in the title role, the film seems to want to be some kind of post-recessional pick-me-up, an “It Gets Better” video for…

Page One chronicles the lives of three NYT newshounds

Nobody cries, “Stop the presses!” in Andrew Rossi’s Page One: Inside the New York Times; no one would dare. There’s a palpable fear that it could actually happen. Rossi’s documentary, which might have been called “Inside Baseball: Inside the New York Times,” opens with a montage of the press in…

No more Transformers sequels? Please, Jesus, let it be true

As the world braces for the money-shot of Michael Bay’s third and most massive robo-jaculation since his last entry into the Transformers mega-conglomeration two years ago, it’s increasingly looking like franchise star Shia LaBoeuf might be, uh, pulling out, so to speak. That would be the second serious loss to…

Amid a torrent of stylistic effects, Submarine stays the course

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a rampant fifteen-year-old only child, has two presiding preoccupations, detailed in rapid voiceover throughout Submarine: a broody classmate, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), and the flatlined sex life of his parents (show-stealers Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins), brought to crisis by the arrival of mom’s glam-guru old flame…

Bad Teacher reminds us that change is desperately needed in Hollywood

From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids, a case could be made that 2011 will be remembered as the year the film industry (finally!) acknowledged its institutional misogyny, took steps to reverse it, and even learned that letting chicks…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Coming out of the closet at 75 in Beginners

Playing an emotionally asphyxiated illustrator whose cancer-stricken dad comes out of the closet at age 75, Ewan McGregor looks positively yummy in Beginners, a gay-is-okay dramedy from the distributor that brought us The Kids Are All Right. In fact, this semi-autobiographical movie by SoCal skater-boy-turned-graphic-designer-and-filmmaker Mike Mills has no shortage…

The Art of Getting By is about as far from true adolescence as you can get

Gavin Wiesen’s first film, as passive and vanilla as its title, continues the numbing trendlet begun in 2008 with Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist: dramatizing the stupefying dullness of privileged white teenagers in New York City. Protagonist George (Freddie Highmore) is an eighteen-year-old Upper West Side Bartleby, preferring not to…

Super 8: The critical take in defense of nostalgia

Browsing through the reviews of Super 8, it seems like a lot of fans and critics are giving the film — a pastiche of late ’70s/early ’80s Spielberg — a soft critical pass based on their nostalgic reactions to the time period in which it’s set and their love of…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…