It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…
At what point do we stop looking at a show like Black Mirror as a sign of things to come and start acknowledging it as a reflection of where we already are? All the Terminators and 2001s in the world couldn’t prevent us from lusting after self-driving cars, asking Siri…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights the opening-night feature, La La Land, and offers a preview…
A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick…
Boo! A Madea Halloween was the number-one movie the weekend it was released, baffling Hollywood once again and making the Hotep crowd pissed that a movie starring a black guy in a dress made more money than alleged rapist Nate Parker’s still-struggling The Birth of a Nation. (Meanwhile, these woke…
I’m not afraid to admit that I get a kick out of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers. Yes, they’re indifferently plotted and predictably written. But I’m a sucker for ludicrous, centuries-spanning conspiracies and indulgent faux-gnosticism. The books serve, if nothing else, as gripping tours through art-world apocrypha, and Brown’s know-it-all…
Netflix’s The Crown, a drama series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, is the kind of sumptuous but tasteful British royals porn you’d expect from Ye Olde Masterpiece Theatre, not from the streaming giant that gave us BoJack Horseman and Stranger Things. A $130 million joint American/British…
The Ten Best Film Events in Denver in November
The 39th Denver Film Festival starts on November 2, and as one more lure for moviegoers, the Denver Film Society has announced that in addition to showing over 200 films, the eleven-day festival will welcome more than 130 talented guests, with some special stars pulled aside for award recognition. DFS had…
The question on my mind as I prepared for the Stanley Hotel’s annual Shining Ball: Is my costume good enough? Every October, the iconic hotel in Estes Park, which is the focus of Westword’s current cover story, “Shine On,” hosts one of Colorado’s most exclusive Halloween parties. It makes sense…
Michael Moore has mellowed — and mostly stopped playing dumb. His new film, a present-tense rah-rah-Hillary insta-job put together on the schedule of an episode of South Park, seems from its title to promise the provocations of his early work, another round of the prankish lefty everyschlub wandering a red…
An archeologist, a North Korean dictator, a Norse god, two photographers, the people of Indonesia and a tribal chief who believes Jesus is actually black American WWII soldier John Frum all look into a volcano and see their fates. That’s not the beginning of a joke; it’s the premise of…
In his own October surprise, filmmaker Michael Moore is releasing his new film, Michael Moore in Trumpland, just days before the election; the controversial director will be popping up with Skype Q&A sessions after shows at the Sie FilmCenter in Denver and the International Film Series in Boulder. Filmed fewer than…
Rob Zombie can do better than 31. For proof, just watch any other Rob Zombie movie. The musician-turned-filmmaker’s body of onscreen work is as nasty and brutal as you’d expect of a metal singer whose first band took its name from a pre-Code horror film, but it’s also been marked…
Writer/director Osgood Perkins has been peeking at my Shirley Jackson book collection, and he’s already read through my favorites: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson, who penned chilling ghost stories and moral tales in the ‘40s, ’50s and ’60s — like her…
If you’re a vulnerable young woman who gets hit on by lecherous older men, you might think that you could do worse than having a guy like Henry at your side. He has a low tolerance for ass grabbers, for one; he’s known to take such bird dogs by their…
America never understood Oasis’ hugeness. By that I don’t just mean the band’s epochal mid-’90s global popularity or the nationalistic fervor it stirred in the U.K. I mean, simply, its hugeness of sound. In the States, only the ballads connected, the glorious/meaningless Beatle raptures “Wonderwall,” “Live Forever” and “Champagne Supernova”…
It’s rare for a franchise, especially in the horror genre, to actually get better as it progresses — doubly so if the final part of said progression is a TV series. Yet in six-part miniseries form, currently airing on the you-didn’t-know-you-had-it Pop network following a broadcast in Australia earlier this…
Before we get into the matter of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, we must first address the issue of the man actually playing Jack Reacher. Resolved: Tom Cruise has absolutely nothing in common physically with author Lee Child’s crime-solving ex-military drifter. Cruise is famously diminutive; Reacher is famously tall and…
The zombie invasion was sudden and swift. There were at least a hundred of them, with gaping flesh wounds and bulging eyes, moaning and dragging their feet as they scoured their surroundings for fresh brains. It was an alarming sight for the bride and groom who happened to be taking…
Between The Night Manager, Veep and now Chance, a new Hulu series adapted from a nasty Kem Nunn novel, Hugh Laurie has had an exceptional year in television. The Hulu program stands out slightly above the rest, considering its resonant dialogue with the Oxford-born Laurie’s most famous role. Like House,…
