As if hunting wild jungle pig in the Amazon wasn’t enough adventure, Matt Wright had to go and contract an extremely rare flesh-eating bacterial infection. Actually, Wright met up with four different kinds of flesh-eating bacteria while he was a contestant on Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid spin-off series, Naked and Afraid XL.
Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…
The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.” However simple, the phrase hypnotically evokes the sinister, insoluble mysteries that have been at the core of many of his ten features and especially in Twin…
Heavyweight almost-champ Chuck Wepner was a character long before he inspired Sylvester Stallone to pen Rocky. But Wepner is no Rocky Balboa. Sure, he comes from a working-class town (Bayonne, New Jersey), and when he boxed, he took a good punch, bled like a hemophiliac and dreamed of taking home…
However you look at Julian Assange — radical hero, martyr, Trumpist sell-out, probable rapist, victim of his cult of personality — there’s something in Laura Poitras’ documentary Risk to confirm your point of view. You might not think there would be much left to say on this subject, particularly after…
In Montana, where writer-director Sarah Adina Smith filmed her small-town sci-fi flick, Buster’s Mal Heart, the winter-inversion clouds hang heavy in valleys, trapping the sunlight that bounces off the snow. The effect is a perpetual, sullen twilight. Smith embraces that between-light-and-dark aspect of Big Sky Country to tell the story…
Pour one out for the summer movie season, which was once Memorial Day till Labor Day but now has spread like a self-replicating, geometrically evolving A.I. determined to cleanse the Earth of human vermin. Around the turn of the century, the summer movies started showing up the first weekend in…
Chris Gethard, the comedian and talk-show host, has the look of his own comic-strip avatar. Those black glasses, that elfin, upright forelock, the eyebrows that dance in alarm and amazement: Onstage, in his one-man show, Career Suicide, Gethard could be Charles Schulz’s sketch of Chris Gethard, a work of cartoon…
Newly restored, James Ivory’s elegant and passionate 1987 film, Maurice, adapted from the posthumously published novel by E.M. Forster, is being rereleased. Last year, I had the chance to discuss this film and some of Ivory’s other works with the director. Here is some of our conversation. I remember the…
In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences saw an opening for outreach: Get real science in the movies. And by November of that year, it had begun the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which offered a way for Hollywood to link up with scientists to advise and consult on projects. Dr…
The Alamo Drafthouse opened a theater at 4255 West Colfax Avenue this week, in the rapidly changing Sloan’s Lake area. This is the Texas-based chain’s second location in metro Denver, and it has blockbuster ambitions for cutting-edge programming. But at least one reader doesn’t appreciate this artistic addition to the neighborhood.
Spouses can develop special bonds, but there may be no couple who took that bond more seriously than performance artists Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye P-Orridge. The couple underwent surgeries to become mirror images of each other, turning into “the Pandrogyne,” an all-gender-inclusive spiritual entity of their own creation.
The newest Alamo Drafthouse opens on Thursday, May 11, on West Colfax, in Sloan’s Lake neighborhood. It will have all the amenities of the Littleton location…and more.
“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this…
Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…
Master of None streams on Netflix There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive…
I Love Dick streams on Amazon starting Friday, May 12 I Love Dick, the epistolary novel, is an obsessive confessional story from a woman — a version of the author Chris Kraus — who, in her letters, lusts for an English art critic named Dick. He barely returns the affection…
The true heart of Michael Mann’s Heat is revealed a little more than an hour into the film. No, I’m not talking about the classic coffee conversation between Robert De Niro’s master thief, Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino’s obsessed LAPD cop, Vincent Hanna — that fantastic and immortal face-off comes…
Rebekah Henderson, a librarian at the Ross-Cherry Creek branch of the Denver Public Library, met Trish Tolentino when Tolentino came into the library to film a participant in one of Henderson’s reading programs. Tolentino owns Stories Not Forgotten, through which she makes short documentaries for families, capturing stories and interviews as a video keepsake.
Carrie Fisher’s death makes this a particularly notable May the Fourth Star Wars Day, and around Denver people are hitting the streets to celebrate the Force and the dark side alike.
Serial Mom is available in a new Blu-ray edition from Shout Factory. John Waters’ response to boxes — the kind in which we tend to place others and ourselves — is to vomit on them. And then sell them, his pencil-thin mustache twisting in a good-humored smirk. Throughout his career…
Not long before the surprisingly violent finale of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Melanie Griffith’s wild girl-turned-good-girl-turned-complicated-girl Audrey asks Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a straight-arrow-Wall-Streeter-turned-desperate-romantic-turned-man-of-action, “What are you gonna do now that you know how the other half lives?” “The other half?” he asks, confused. “The other half of you.” The…
