Pete’s Dragon is as cuddly as the mountains of plush toys Disney hopes to sell from it. A disarmingly homespun blockbuster, this loose remake of the studio’s 1977 live-action/animation hybrid is perhaps best defined by all the things it’s not: It’s not a soaring action flick, nor an indulgence in…
Hell or High Water sees a Scottish director making a down-home, West Texas–set movie about cars, guns, brothers, banks and twist-off beers. But this outsider’s perspective is nothing new for David Mackenzie, who has worked with Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche on a Los Angeles romance about a gigolo (2009’s…
Do we call Anthropoid a thriller? Sean Ellis’ earnest, day-ruining WWII bullet-a-thon is rooted in fact but comes on like pulp fiction in its first reels, hitting secret-mission story beats old enough to have served in the big war. As freedom fighters Josef (Jamie Dornan) and Jan (Cillian Murphy) skulk…
Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a likable study of delusions of grandeur. Working from real-life material, Frears creates an alternately funny and mysterious portrait of someone whom most viewers either don’t know at all or regard as an odd footnote in musical history. We first see Florence (Meryl Streep)…
In 2014, Missouri passed a law that requires women to wait at least 72 hours between an initial doctor’s appointment and having an abortion. Today, Missouri is one of the hardest states in the country in which to obtain [changed “get” to “obtain”] the procedure. That’s great news for anti-choicers…
You can hear the barking of the dog days of summer as we move through August, and fans of Adult Swim — the Cartoon Network’s popular late-night block of edgier animated fare — have a big date to mark on their calendars: On September 10, the Adult Swim Drive-In is…
Mike Birbiglia’s Don’t Think Twice stands as the best, most revealing film about comedy people and one of the best about artistic collaboration. It’s a boisterous and sensitive work of many facets: tender group portraiture, bang-on media satire, low-key romance, evenhanded inquiry into the ethics of selling out. Above all…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment and death, but his distinct touch —…
In his latest family portrait, Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda chronicles roughly a year in the life of the Koda clan — or what’s left of it. When, years ago, her father left for another woman and their mother subsequently abandoned the family to live her own life, Sachi (Haruka…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
The end of summer is in sight, but there’s still plenty of geek fun to be had before it’s gone. August has a full slate of nerd-tinged fun, from movies to music and all points in between. Here are the month’s ten best geek events, in chronological order. 10. Weird Al…
Marcos Garibay wasn’t really planning on launching a multi-volume cinematic franchise, in the tradition of such dystopic sci-fi series as Hunger Games and Divergent, when he took a job as a paraprofessional at Dupont Elementary in Commerce City three years ago. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted a career…
August is here, marking the start of the long stretch between the summer and holiday movie seasons. To fill the gaps, local film programmers are getting in gear to roll out special acquisitions, programs and guest stars that will keep the movie-watching machine well-oiled and running smoothly. Here, in chronological…
The Sie FilmCenter gets it. “We understand, it can be a gamble to walk into your local independent theater and buy a ticket for film you don’t know anything about,” says JoAnna Cintron, the Denver Film Society’s spokeswoman. “It can be scary. There might be subtitles (shudder)… or possibly an actor you haven’t…
Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and…
In Patricia Rozema’s quiet, sci-fi-lite thriller Into the Forest, the power goes out pretty quickly, but the film itself is electric. Nell (Ellen Page) studies for the SAT and chats with her boyfriend on a futuristic floating computer screen, while her sister Eva (Evan Rachel Wood) twists her body into…
Patricia Rozema is what you might call a “working director.” Her first credit was Second Assistant Director on three episodes of the acclaimed children’s series, Sharon, Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show in 1984, and since then she’s written, directed and produced art-house shorts, film-industry docs, a music-and-dance film (Yo-Yo Ma…
The ludicrous but amusing teen social-media thriller Nerve is committed to pinning its characters into a world we understand as ours. It opens with Skype, Spotify, Gmail and Chrome, all on the MacBook screen of a mousily beautiful teen, Vee (Emma Roberts), who you just know is one horrific adventure…
A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his…
Café Society is surprisingly ambitious by the standards of late-period Woody Allen — a veritable epic taking in a broad swath of a young man’s life and charting his progress from wide-eyed innocent to cold, confident operator. But that’s also why the film, in some senses, could only have been…
