The Alamo Drafthouse was buzzing yesterday with the appearance of legendary comedian Jack Black on the red carpet, alongside Goosebumps co-stars Odeya Rush, Dylan Minnette and Ryan Lee. The film, based on the beloved ’90s kids’ horror-book series, opens in theaters October 16 — but will kick off the Mile…
At long last, Geektober is almost here! Yes, the rest of the world may know it by its traditional name, October, but geeks know the month really belongs to us. Don’t believe it? Just have a look at Denver’s lineup of great geek fun for the month and you’ll be…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
Revered American crime novelist James Ellroy is coming to Denver this weekend to kick off an exciting new film series at the Alamo Drafthouse. On Saturday, September 26, Ellroy will host a screening of Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film L.A. Confidential, which was based on Ellroy’s novel of the same name. That…
“Giallo” translates to “yellow” in Italian, plain and simple — but when the word is used to denote a particular style of literature and film, it is terrifyingly more. The giallo genre comprises a stylish thriller that generally involves a masked killer stalking women and men alike, usually with revenge…
Given the rich Latino heritage that runs through Colorado, it’s surprising that a properly programmed and produced film festival celebrating all of our diverse hermanos y hermanas took so long to appear. It wasn’t until last year that the Denver Film Society produced the first CineLatino Film Festival — and…
In the mid-twentieth century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life — and…
Colorado is photogenic, and proves it in more than a hundred films. It first posed for the camera in 1897, when James H. White and Frederick Blechynden shot short “actualities” such as Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys, and the kinetic Denver Fire Brigade, in which horse-drawn engines, careening and…
With Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner introducing themselves not just to America but the world, the stories of transgender people are beginning to find vocal and visual platforms. From This Day Forward, a documentary screening Tuesday at the Sie FilmCenter, adds a fascinating new chapter. It’s the story of…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features — which is curious, since the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a seventeenth-century folktale than a late-twentieth-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In 1980s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
When the dust finally settles on 2015, it may most likely be known as the year of Caitlyn Jenner. Amid months of rumor and speculation and a ratings-breaking Diane Sawyer interview, she left behind her role as a gold-medal clad Olympian and eventual put-upon straight man and step/father amid the…
LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl. Conservatives…
A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…
Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you…
Mark your calendars, amigos: The Denver Film Society has announced it will host the second annual CineLatino Film Festival from September 24 through September 27, to coincide with Hispanic Heritage month. This four-day-long festival will celebrate the best in cinema from Latin America, Mexico, Europe and the United States, presenting…
The Steve Jobs documentary from Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) is worth seeing even if you’re tired of Apple fanboys — if only for the curious parallels between Apple worshippers and the members of the Church of Scientology, the subject of Gibney’s other recent doc (Going Clear)…
