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Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Even the finest documentarians need great material — and filmmaker Kevin Rafferty’s got plenty of it in Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, which begins a week-long run on Friday, April 10, at Starz. Both teams were unbeaten going into this 1968 game, which took place against the backdrop of campus unrest…

Observe and Report

Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…

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Emilio Lobato, David Mazza and Dale Chisman. The main attraction at Havu is Emilio Lobato: De Veras, featuring an eye-dazzling display of paintings that rely on the horizontal line for their visual interest. Lobato’s distinguished career dates back several decades; some of the amazing attributes associated with him are his…

Skills Like This

Skills Like This, which makes its Boulder debut on Wednesday, April 8, prior to a run at Starz FilmCenter that begins April 17, is a funky, if minor, valentine to the Mile High City. The story, about a talent-free playwright turned one-man crime spree (Spencer Berger, who also wrote the…

Adventureland

Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for its leg warmers and knee socks than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather to participate in those analog rituals known as Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole. Drawn…

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Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…

Ballerina at Starz

Ballerina, a documentary that premieres at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, March 27, may not be an especially daring piece of work, but its subject matter is so fascinating that the results are regularly compelling anyway. Director Bertrand Normand’s look at Russia’s Kirov Ballet is primarily a celebration, and the five…

I Love You, Man

Just when we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text; it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms:…

Duplicity

Whether it’s the amnesiac super spy of the Bourne franchise or the weary law-firm fixer of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy specializes in characters who wear so many masks that, memory loss or no, they scarcely know who they are anymore. Guided by instinct, his soldiers of fortune patrol a ruthless…

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Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…

Munchkins, Movies & Music

Obviously, movies are an important part of Munchkins, Movies & Music, a biweekly event whose third edition takes place on Friday morning at the Oriental Theater. After all, the word itself gets second billing in the title. But specific films aren’t part of the draw, according to Scott LaBarbera, a…

The Last House on the Left

That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…

Gomorrah

Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it’s a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. Gomorrah takes its punning…

High and Low at the Boulder Public Library

Throughout his career, director Akira Kurosawa regularly brought his distinctively Eastern vision to Western cinematic elements, with fascinating results. But whereas Kurosawa’s best-known films, including 1950’s Rashomon and 1961’s Yojimbo, tend to be set in a medieval Japan strode by samurai, 1963’s High and Low is a contemporary crime tale,…

Watchmen

The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year, Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering…

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Ary Stillman. Singer gallery director Simon Zalkind is a brilliant curator who has made the humble Mizel Arts & Culture Center an important destination for art lovers. Being a Jewish institution, the Singer often features shows devoted to the efforts of Jewish artists, and that’s the case with Ary Stillman:…

Now Showing

Ary Stillman. Singer gallery director Simon Zalkind is a brilliant curator who has made the humble Mizel Arts & Culture Center an important destination for art lovers. Being a Jewish institution, the Singer often features shows devoted to the efforts of Jewish artists, and that’s the case with Ary Stillman:…

Donkey Punch at Starz FilmCenter

Numerous reviews of Donkey Punch, an alternately glossy and loony thriller that debuts at Starz FilmCenter this week, have argued that the opening portions of the film, in which a trio of British party girls vacationing in Spain hook up with a group of randy young sailors on a lavish…

Two Lovers

If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, was twelve years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…

Now Showing

Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…

Seconds at Boulder Public Library

Seconds, which screens at the Boulder Public Library on Thursday, February 19, holds a bizarre place in rock history. According to legend, the 1966 flick helped trigger the mental collapse of Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, who was reportedly so traumatized by it that he didn’t see another movie in…