The latest chin-out probe into the mutual-lockjaw Israeli-Palestinian scenario from Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, zippy melodrama Omar immediately homes in on an athletic Arab twenty-something (Adam Bakri) scaling the West Bank wall and shrugging off gunfire in order to both visit his swooningly adorable girlfriend (Leem Lubany) and meet…
Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown on screen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in…
(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-time-stream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…
Local filmmaker Brad Stabio created the Denver Actor Project, an ongoing showcase of local actors, to demonstrate the talent that can be found in the Mile High City. The project premiered at the Starz Denver Film Festival last November with a series of six short films, and Stabio hopes to…
Hollywood peddles movies like a chef flings noodles at the wall. Does it stick? If so, perfecto. If it splats on the floor, well, movie moguls have enough dough to try again. The one thing audiences can be certain of is that each year, Hollywood is guaranteed to serve up…
Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…
The fairy-tale fear of a powerful man stealing children is the infuriating heart of Kids for Cash, a compelling and well-reported documentary look at how Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, teenagers wound up serving bona fide cell time for crimes like slapping a classmate, buying a scooter that turned out to have…
Action heroes with nothing to lose are the best kind, perhaps the only kind worth watching. In the opening seconds of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop, Liam Neeson’s federal air marshal, Bill Marks, slumps in his parked vehicle, sloshing a few glugs of whiskey into a paper cup and stirring it up…
In 1998, Douglas Adams published a sweet, funny essay called “Riding the Rays,” about an excursion to Hayman Island to try a kind of underwater jet-ski device called a Sub Bug because it afforded an opportunity to swim with manta rays. And manta rays are cool. He wrote of his…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t . . . or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric…
It was sad — Jay Leno’s 22 years hosting The Tonight Show ended with all the excitement of a guy farting at the mall. We all talked about his joke stealing and his talk-show stealing and how he’d played to the middle, threw away his talent. We were happy to…
Johnny Minotaur, surrealist poet and artist Charles Henri Ford’s 1971 film, is a lyrical explosion of taboos: Incest, man-boy love and power dynamics, pansexuality and autoeroticism are just a few of the issues he grapples with. After the film was lost for two decades, the New American Cinema Group worked…
Taking a sober look at the thousands of untested household chemicals triggering disease is enough to make a person panic and run for the hills. But the activists and filmmakers behind The Human Experiment, which screens on Saturday, February 22 as part of the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, do just…
As the Denver Film Society prepares to celebrate the worst movies of 2013 at tonight’s Golden Raspberry party, Westword asked a few players (those that were brave enough to talk about it) in the local film about which flicks they think were the biggest flops. See also: PBBT! Pronouncing the…
Gayle Crites and Andrew Beckham. As she usually does, Tina Goodwin has paired a couple of solos at her namesake gallery, with one in the larger front space and the other in the smaller corridor in back. At first glance, Gayle Crites: The Cloth That Binds appears to be an…
Basically a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to the female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is also a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, however, In Secret…
Two words uttered in the dark — “What happened?” — open The Square, Jehane Noujaim’s powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt’s struggle for meaningful change. Several documentaries on the country’s 2011 uprising, including Uprising and Tahrir: Liberation Square, rushed to answer that question, and suffered from a certain shortsightedness as a…
In If You Build It, a documentary about a high-concept high school product-design class in, of all places, rural North Carolina, director Patrick Creadon collects rich material but builds a rickety structure. The program is Studio H, led by two enterprising, idealistic architects who are brought to rural Bertie County…
No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter or an Internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past thirty years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or at least remake…
