One of the year’s best films, Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live. “We live in a country that…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
Cinematic girl power returns to the Sie FilmCenter on Tuesday, March 17, as the Voices Women + Film Festival begins its fifth edition with a globetrotting slate of new films, filmmakers and discussions by, for and about women — one of the most underserved festival audiences. “I think this is…
“There are some tough films on the program,” says Boulder Jewish Film Festival artistic director Kathryn Bernheimer. “I can program challenging movies because we have a really great audience that is willing to engage intellectually and is adventurous artistically.” The third annual edition of the week-long celebration of films focusing on…
“Mark Twain once said that boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he’s successful, can rub shoulders with royalty,” says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out nineteen opponents in a row. “Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king,…
The season five debut of Game of Thrones is still a month away, which leaves you plenty of time to catch up and/or get reacquainted with its complex and detailed interweaving storylines. One great chance to do exactly that is Saturday, March 14, when the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City…
It seems as if, for every ten issue-oriented documentaries that essentially function as long-form magazine articles with images attached, we get perhaps one doc that exemplifies the methods of “direct cinema” — the observational mode of documentary filmmaking that allows audiences to observe from a detached remove. That mode is…
“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of eighty, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharp’s suit…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing straw man, knee-jerk cynicism —…
There’s no empowerment message embedded in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, no “Girls can do anything!” cheerleader vibe. That’s why it’s wonderful. This is a straight, no-chaser fairy story, a picture to be downed with pleasure. It worries little about sending the wrong message and instead trusts us to decode its politics,…
It’s an ironic truth that directors fascinated by robots tend to make inhuman movies. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to last year’s Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question…
In Boulder, it seems that climbing culture has always been around – the need to wear stretchy pants, to make impossible ascents, to perform crazy feats of gravity-defying derring-do. There, climbing is a kind of hypercompetitive Zen performance art. It’s fitting then that a new, epic climbing-history documentary, Valley Uprising,…
There are five reasons why Fox’s Empire has become a breakout hit, and on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we run down why the show, introduced as a mid-season replacement, has surged to nearly 14 million viewers an episode by its eighth week. Joining Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl…
Almost immediately after it was released, the 2011 stealth hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became more of a punchline than a movie. Who knew “older” people were so starved for pictures featuring gorgeously shot exotic locales, not to mention people falling in love, falling out of love or desperately…
Sundance is over and Oscar season — but the show will go on at local movie theaters. In March, screens will light up with two Alfred Hitchcock classics, several film festivals and a survey of Italian neorealism. Audiences will also be able to spend an entire weekend with one of the…
Beginning March 2, Mondays will truly be a drag as Tracks Denver hosts not only a free viewing party of every new episode of Season 7, but holds its own intensive drag competition to find Denver’s Ultimate Queen. Come for RuPaul’s patented annual drama — but stay for the homegrown…
Leonard Nimoy has died at the age of 83. Both on camera and off, he exemplified the best of what Star Trek, and thus humanity, could represent. Part of that was Trek’s writing, of course. But it was Nimoy who took what was on the page — often repaired what…
There was an awkward moment between Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson and her mom, Melanie Griffith, on the red carpet before the Oscars on Sunday. But the world got to see Johnson’s impressive talent for pretending uncomfortable situations don’t seem to bother her (see also: Fifty Shades of…
In a cinematic universe where the rules for viability are changing almost daily, the film festival is becoming an endangered species. Less than 25 percent of them make it past the sixth year. But next week, Boulder International Film Festival will celebrate its eleventh season, which runs from March 5…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating and generally making life…
If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’s Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…
Is it possible to like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice and emptiness, and in places it’s smart and astringently funny. Yet it seems to be fighting its own bone…
