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…
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…
Best-selling Chinese-American author Lisa See, who will read from her new book Dreams of Joy tomorrow evening at the Tattered Cover, is an extraordinary researcher: Her fierce desire to get the details right has taken her around the world, to museums and libraries, and even into the small worlds of…
Anyone who has ever been blocked in while trying to drop off a passenger knows there are plenty of dicks at Denver International Airport. And anyone who has followed Westword knows that there are plenty of conspiracy theories about the place as well — many, many theories. But those aren’t…
Ever since MTV announced in February that Beavis and Butt-Head would return to television, we’ve been getting more and more stoked for the comeback of these cherished cartoon cretins. In anticipation of the redo, which is slated for this summer, we take a look at four more ’90s TV shows…
There’s nothing like found footage to showcase a wide cross-section of humanity’s most maladapted, inept and bizarre, and as far as that goes, nothing beats the original. Since 1991, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have been collecting old VHS tapes, and in 2004, they started editing down the weirdest and…
Stan Winston, silver-haired demon and chief architect of nightmares the world over, died in his home in Malibu on this day in 2008, hopefully after transferring his consciousness to an ageless state-of-the-art animatronic he developed in his spare time that continues to work in secret, creating the scariest robots in…
For my dad, it’s Some Like it Hot. For me, it’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. They’re catnip movies: the films you’ll watch when they come on TV no matter how many times you’ve seen them before. Commercials? Yes. Edited scenes? Yes. I don’t care. Hand me a…
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,…
Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death has the title and the feel of a monument. This widescreen, austerely monochromatic, two-hour-plus collective drama — depicting the worst indignity inflicted by foreigners on modern China, as well as the most terrible atrocity in the run-up to World War II — might…
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…
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…
Now in its second season, the B-Sides film series at the Denver Film Center digs up and plays some kitschier movies of the last few decades as companions to this summer’s Film on the Rocks’ picks. For each movie shown at Red Rocks, B-Sides will offer a similar film at the Denver…
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…
Lift tickets, lesssons, lodging, and gear rentals for a posse rolling more than 20 deep? Duggar family parents Jim Bob and Michelle may not have had ponying up for family ski vacations on the brain while they were getting busy and getting down to business with the practical side of…
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,…
L’amour Fou opens with unbroken footage from designer Yves Saint-Laurent’s 2002 speech announcing his retirement from fashion after forty-plus years at the helm of the massively important label bearing his name. It’s a stunning performance, flowing from naked confessional (“I have known the false friends of tranquilizers…and emerged dazzled but…
A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams’s much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory. Opening three weeks before July 4th, this Steven Spielberg-produced, kid-centric 21st-century disaster flick could well hang in at theaters till the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — an event that haunts Super 8 nearly as…
Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life bears forth a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching…
After years of mind-boggling advances in the realm of CG animation courtesy of Pixar and, uh, everybody copying Pixar, it’s pretty impressive to see something as visually crappy as The Lion of Judah, an animated allegory for the Christ story from Rocky Mountain Pictures, which, thank God, is not based…
It’s sunny outside, with green foliage and clear skies — the perfect time to spend your day in an air-conditioned room with no windows wearing stupid 3D sunglasses, being bored for three hours straight. That’s right, it’s summer movie movie season, and every weekend brings a new event to your…
The winners of the 32nd annual Mountainfilm in Telluride festival were announced on Monday and include eight films in five categories. We’ve got the trailers after the jump, and we’ll shout them out on this blog later in the year if and when any of them will be screening in…
