Here’s what matters most: You will laugh. Kevin Hart on a stage before thousands, yapping for more than an hour? I don’t care what kind of miserable killjoy you are, you’re going to laugh. There are two reasons you might be offended — you may find the material either too…
There’s plenty of time to wonder, as J.K. Simmons narrates page after page of backstory, whether the creators of The Accountant realized that their dutifully twisty R-rated thriller was actually another superhero story. Yes, it’s got trappings of psychology and adult thoughtfulness, speeches about the mysteries of the brain and…
Today the Denver Film Society releases the full schedule for the 39th Denver Film Festival, taking place November 2 – 13 at the Sie FilmCenter, Ellie Caulkins Opera House and the UA Denver Pavilions Stadium. With over 200 titles representing local, national and international independent films — as well as industry panels, workshops,…
For the semifinals of the Ultimate Queen All-Stars competition at Tracks last week, the category was “Dance & Choreography” — and the girls were stretched and ready for a fantastic and footloose battle, with a double elimination looming. Since one of the contest prizes is a six-month gig at the city’s…
Filmmakers remix classic movies for countless reasons: nostalgia, mining old footage for new meaning, creating jokes or social commentary. Then there’s Gregg Biermann, who processes Hollywood classics and sometimes his own footage through mathematical formulas designed to create digital optical patterns that are not always beautiful, psychologically innovative or rich in…
Punk is so much more than loud music with rebellious lyrics screamed over electric guitars wailing three chords and 16th notes. It’s more than leather jackets, Mohawks and patches. It’s even more than radical politics that veer far right or far left. It’s rough around the edges, cheap to make and…
In less than a month, the 39th Denver Film Festival will be upon us, and the Denver Film Society just announced titles for its prestigious November 2 opening night, along with centerpiece nights and closing festivities on November 13. Kicking off the festival will be the playful third film by…
They say there’s no accounting for taste, and here to prove it is The Greasy Strangler. A fringe-inhabiting genre provocation destined for a self-selecting audience with strong stomachs, co-writer/director Jim Hosking’s feature-length whatsit tests sensibilities, but Hosking forgets that oddity isn’t a substitute for quality. The film offers a chance…
Command and Control is frightening for a whole pants-shitting list of reasons, but perhaps the scariest is that the near-detonation of a nuclear warhead in 1980 was sparked by the tiniest imaginable accident. A technician working on a Titan missile in a Damascus, Arkansas, silo dropped a wrench socket from…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voice-over in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy might technically be coming back to theaters for one night only, but for many of us, it’s been running on an endless loop for years. In a world where Donald Trump is a presidential candidate and some cafes are now offering blowjobs with your morning coffee, it’s…
You might have let yourself act surprised as the waters have risen and the floods have come. But you can’t anymore, not after 13th, Ava DuVernay’s miraculous cine-history of the criminalization of American blackness. Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a…
One of the strengths of a good drag queen can often be her ability to MacGyver a whole outfit together with nothing more than a yard of fabric, rhinestones, hot glue and a prayer. Week six of the Ultimate Queen All-Stars battle at Tracks challenged the gals to create looks…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
There’s little in the way of setup or explanation for what the “bad batch” is or how the members of such a motley, unfortunate tribe of humans were banished to a desert wasteland in Ana Lily Amirpour’s post-apocalyptic action dramedy. Instead, Amirpour just lets the camera linger on a sign…
I want to take a moment to apologize to Anne Hathaway. Ms. Hathaway, as you’ve grown from precocious princess (The Princess Diaries) and embattled intern (The Devil Wears Prada) to destitute prostitute (Les Misérables) and back again to Disney royalty (Alice Through the Looking Glass), I’ve sometimes judged you unfairly,…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, not Christmas. It’s Halloween season! Otherwise known as the time of year when young lovers look for movies to tremble through together and psychotic minds (all of us, really) crave a good scream…or just a simple onscreen bloody decapitation. Enjoy this…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voiceover in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
This week, our critics took to the theaters to review four new films. Tim Burton proves he’s still got it in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Mark Wahlberg guides us through a surreal tragedy in Deepwater Horizon, and we learn about music’s man behind the curtain in Danny Says. Here are…
The techniques of verbatim theater go back decades, to at least the 1950s, when young German theater troupes would reenact complicated court cases word for word onstage. Even earlier, in the United States, the WPA paid for a form of this performance with its Living Newspapers, in which theater artists…
