Once, American comedies concerned underdog heroes who challenged the status quo and seized the territory of the upper-class characters who thought they were in control. Slobs vs. snobs. During the wartime administration of the lesser President Bush, the wealthy thoroughly dominated the culture, occupying America the way the army patrolled…
Michael German went undercover with white supremacists for a year and with right-wing militants for another eight months and now he wants to set some things straight. “One of the things I learned working undercover is that the studies that the FBI or even academia had on these groups were…
Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican “on a steeeek” character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the ’90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film…
Visibility of the LGBTQ community in new media and pop culture continues to rise, and adding to it is the new web series Her Story. The trans-forward series is getting an in-depth presentation, complete with its creators and talent, and courtesy of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado and the Sie FilmCenter,…
Nuts!, a marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid, couldn’t have come along at a better time. Director Penny Lane (Our Nixon) showcases, with wit and suspense, the undoing of one of the 20th century’s great flimflam artists, a huckster who seized then-new communication technologies — and the trappings of Christian divinity…
The Bronx is burning in the introductory episodes of The Get Down, Netflix’s new series that presents as urban-cinematic fable the genesis of rap. The cluttered, over-caffeinated 90-minute pilot, directed by creator and executive producer Baz Luhrmann, takes place in the summer of 1977, when a serial killer terrorized New…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
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…
