Everyone loves Batman. The world’s greatest detective has managed to become the world’s most popular superhero over the course of his 75-year existence, all without any actual superpowers. Along the way, his bravery, his mission and his ability to hang with the heroes who can literally throw cars around like…
When I showed up for an advance screening of Focus on the Family’s documentary, Irreplaceable, about one man’s attempt to define what makes a family, I had a knot in my stomach. I was entering hostile territory. See also: James Mhoon on Focus on the Family’s new documentary and God’s…
Does God exist and, if so, has he provided humanity with a perfect design for family structure? James Mhoon thinks so. As vice president of Content Development and Integration for the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, he leads the organization’s charge to spread the word about the importance of…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source that science has dubbed…
The vampires that walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, the director’s most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period,…
Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-racking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he was a boy…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Tonight at the world-famous Stanley Hotel, the Stanley Film Festival will kick off its second year with Alexandre O. Philippe’s look at zombie culture, Doc of the Dead. [Disclosure: I appear in Doc of the Dead.] Sunday, the fest closes with the horror comedy What We Do in the Shadows,…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, convinced his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin in favor of a life of solitude, labor, and the triumphing of their…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Liza Johnson’s proudly frustrating Hateship Loveship is a film you’ll long to like. As middle-aged virgin Johanna, buttoned-up, buttoned-lipped Kristen Wiig seems to have landed in the Midwest from Mars — she could be The Maid Who Fell to Earth. In real life, Johanna would be wearing mom jeans and…
With more than ten million players worldwide, a twenty-year history and a tournament circuit that awards hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the top players, it’s fair to say that Magic: The Gathering is a juggernaut in the gaming industry. Despite that, it’s never garnered the same kind of…
The Berningers are a talented family: Tom Berninger is a filmmaker, and when his brother Matt, a member of the Brooklyn-based band The National, asked him to go on tour as a roadie, he obliged. Tom needed a job and some direction, and his brother’s request inadvertently offered both. Tom…
1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…
Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca and a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden-god perfection…
Sometimes it’s helpful to know certain details about how a film has come together. And sometimes it’s just so much information. Transcendence, the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer, Wally Pfister, was shot on film rather than digitally, as most big Hollywood movies are today. Is that going to…
Today, it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America, the triumph of rhythm over melody — the whirligig boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as the ice cream…
On April 26, filmmakers across the city are invited to take part in One Day in Denver. Novice camera-phone auteurs and skilled movie-makers alike will be capturing their unique perspectives on Denver and then submitting the footage to the multi-faceted documentary project. The project is a spin-off of One Day…
As editor of Found Magazine and a contributor to This American Life, Davy Rothbart has devoted himself to mining humor and pathos from the lives of strangers. When he learned about the Medora Hornets, a high school basketball team suffering through a nasty losing streak in a factory-gutted Heartland community,…
Now that HBO’s magnificent Game of Thrones is back, Sunday nights just became appointment viewing again. That’s great news unless your free HBO just expired, or your ex-roommate finally changed his HBO Go password or you’re not sure you can stand watching alone knowing that the show is probably just…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
