Richard Linklater ended his feel-good Best Picture contender on a high. His star, eighteen-year-old would-be artist Mason, graduated high school and was ready to conquer the world. But what if Linklater had kept filming? And what if Mason wasn’t an actor, but a real teenage boy? Meet Samuel Klemke. He,…
Italian horror film maestro Dario Argento has been freaking out audiences since he first burst on the scene in 1970 with the first in a series of Hitchcock-infused thrillers whose titles matched their stylistic terrors: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet…
Americans love their national parks. And Colorado people love, love, love Rocky Mountain National Park, a 416- square-mile expanse of towering peaks, glacial lakes, tundra, forests and meadows less than two hours’ drive from Denver. Despite being much smaller in size than Yellowstone or Yosemite, RMNP typically ranks among the…
Mortdecai is creeping into theaters with the flushed shame of a debutante who expects to be pelted with tomatoes. It’s a pity. In 1965, Mortdecai would be the hit of the year. Director David Koepp whips through this pop-colored caper about crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) — one…
The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’s great misfortune isn’t that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host: crackerjack comedic skills,…
Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100 takes its name from the Japanese rating system, which proceeds thusly: R15, safe for fifteen-year-olds; R18, safe for adults; and now Matsumoto’s invented category, which, depending on a centenarian’s ticker, could refer to either a calming montage of pigeons or a gonzo sex comedy. If you guessed…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
Brilliant. If you have any interest in modernism or fine craft — even if you aren’t particularly interested in jewelry — you’ll find something to marvel over at the Denver Art Museum’s winter blockbuster Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century. The show is a visual marathon, with so many things…
The bi-coastal film pod continues in 2015! In New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl, along with Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek, connect via the magic of the Internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson to discuss the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, announced on January 15…
Jesus talked a lot about loving the underdog, the meek, the oppressed and the poor. He argued God is love and told his disciple to turn the other cheek. Jesus’s life ended in violence and bloodshed from which he could have liberated himself, but he chose not to fight –…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies — or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies — accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
Forget its generic title, its breakup setup and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love since Obvious Child. Hilarious and heartbroken, Akhavan stars as Shirin, a bisexual Iranian-American video artist just bounced from her lover’s Gowanus apartment. (Relish the memory…
Brilliant.If you have any interest in modernism or fine craft — even if you aren’t particularly interested in jewelry — you’ll find something to marvel over at the Denver Art Museum’s winter blockbuster Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century. The show is a visual marathon, with so many things included…
Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at her works. But Ralph Waldo never lived to see…
Here’s the pipsqueak who has hauled himself up into a sharp-dressed leading man. Here’s the comic who’s boundlessly inventive in his swearing but also suave and commanding in pursuit of love, the motormouth horndog who yawps about like a puppy on fire but can melt your mother’s heart with his…
This Friday, January 16, marks the start of the Colorado State Patrol’s new application process. But to get people interested in the idea of a job in law enforcement, the CSP has created a short promotional video highlighting the women in state patrol — and the fifteen-second video just started…
The Emerging Filmmakers Project got its start at dozen years ago at the Bug Theater, and was honored with one of the initial MasterMind Awards. One of the EFP’s winning events was the EFPalooza Film Festival,which returns to the Bug on Thursday after a several-year hiatus; more than forty local…
Joel and Ethan Coen, the beloved filmmaking duo, have been gathering a cult following with their unique blend of darkly comic — or just flat-out dark or comic — films for over thirty years. From Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou? to No Country For Old Men and The…
Surreal French filmmaker Leos Carax is not a household name — but his last film, Holy Motors, was an accidental accessible art-house hit in 2013. Well, as accessible as a film with a scene featuring Eva Mendes being ogled by an underground troll sporting a real erection onscreen can be…
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the civil-rights era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention the…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he started making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life. They were serious without advertising their sincerity, and…
