The movies never get the Midwest right. When, onscreen, have you seen white people at the grocery store mouth that shy, apologetic “oop” noise every time someone walks close enough that they feel they must shift out of the way? Or a father lecturing his children about the greatness of…
Like just about everyone else, MUBI has gotten into the distribution business — in a way. The streaming service, a favorite among cinephiles, has been offering a curated selection of arthouse titles for years: 30 movies at a time, each available for 30 days. Its new Discoveries platform, which seeks…
Legion, the much-anticipated new FX series created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, wastes no time plunging us into the murky depths of its lead’s unraveling mind, from blissful youth to harrowing adulthood plagued by a failed suicide attempt. Every scene is a dense visual and sonic cornucopia. Even quiet moments…
George Miller’s sci-fi series began in 1979 with the low-budget, practically DIY gearhead grindhouse flick Mad Max, and it was revived in 2015 with the delirious action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. All along the way, these pictures have captured something about their times that has allowed them to break…
Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the…
Denver’s date with actor Cary Elwes and The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable Evening on April 21 was announced just ten days ago, but demand for tickets has been so strong that a second show has been added at the Paramount Theatre on April 20.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem. Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he…
Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…
First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…
Given that it’s a sequel/spinoff built around a mostly throwaway gag in The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie is funnier than you might think it has any right to be. But those of us who were expecting something more can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The LEGO…
Suburban teendom often means killing time, auditioning selves, inhabiting the you that you can pull off for now but also maybe worrying about the you you’ll aim for next. Few films honor that uncertain aimlessness like Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, an anthro-fiction offering exquisitely framed long-take looks at Sarasota teenagers…
We made it to February! Hooray us! Hey, it wasn’t a guarantee, and I’m so proud of us all. As a reward, make sure to watch every single one of these TV shows this month, and I don’t want to hear any excuses! You deserve it. The Quad (BET), Feb…
In the world of cinema, February finds us climbing excitedly out of the wasteland that is January and into this month’s embrace of new films that are sure to hook audiences. Not to mention, there are plenty of special screenings of Academy Award-nominated films in anticipation of the ceremony this…
The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of standup comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…
James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…
In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…
Cary Elwes, the actor who played Westley in The Princess Bride, is coming to Denver to present the film.
Take it from the network that rebranded as Syfy: The best trick in The Magicians is its phoniness. The actors share a broad house-style stiltedness and uniform, plasticine good looks — even the same haircut. The sets, costumes and special effects, while often inventive (a baddie with a head made…
Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at 80, was a reluctant feminist. She wouldn’t even call herself one at all. In 1970, when Moore embodied the character of flighty, 30-year-old single TV news producer Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there was no other such woman portrayed on…
A Dog’s Purpose, based on the novel by W. Bruce Cameron, combines the philosophical belief that living beings are reborn into a different physical body after biological death with the voiceover narrative technique of Look Who’s Talking. The main character, Dog, dies in multiple wrenching scenes and is subsequently reborn;…
Gold’s value lies chiefly in the hearts and minds of those who seek it. The noble metal has driven humans to perpetrate ignoble acts on their quests to unearth it since at least 5000 B.C.E., when slaves divined for golden veins to lavish their Pharaohs with jewelry. The Incas even…
