The Help is this week’s most ridiculous trailer

Gather round, children, and I will tell you of a time — it was, like, at least 50 years ago — when there was racism. Those days are over, of course, and in the bright future of today all humans live in perfect harmony with no economic or institutional discrepancy…

The Help and five other movies starring the Great White Hope

After all the strife and human sacrifice during the civil rights movement, it was pretty awesome in the end when every black person was triumphant in some way and every villain got her hilariously cathartic comeuppance by eating a pie full of feces — but let’s not forget that it…

James Bond’s top five elaborate death scenarios

Among the most instantly recognizable and enduringly popular scenes from the James Bond movie franchise are the elaborate death traps put into place for the protagonist by a seemingly endless array of antiheroes. The sadistic and convoluted plot devices create dramatic tension, or at least amuse audiences, and invariably result…

We talk with the DMNS Curator of Health Sciences about Gattaca

Tomorrow evening brings the final entry in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Sci-Fi Film Series at the Phipps Theater, with Gattaca closing the sequence out with a biological bang. As we have been doing lately, we caught up with the DMNS’ Curator and Department Chair of Health Sciences…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

30 Minutes or Less Barely Delivers

Money-back guarantees feel like such a remnant of the old economy. Does the depressed consumer class even expect companies to make good on their advertised word anymore? But perhaps the dream of free slices scammed from over-promising pizza parlors springs eternal. At least that’s the game being run on Jesse…

Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty subverts the classic fairy tale

The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat’s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses. The Sleeping Beauty, like last year’s Bluebeard, is based on a classic Charles Perrault legend. But Breillat reimagines the slumbering heroine as a gender insurrectionist, freeing her from her…

Bring Attack the Block to Denver or we’ll never forgive you

Attack the Block — the Joe Cornish flick bought to you by Edgar Wright, geek god director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — is an absurdly great movie. It’s the kind of work that inspires kids to become filmmakers, because it’s so…

How The Inner Room, filmed entirely in Colorado, was made

Fairplay, Colorado, is a tiny mountain town with about one street, situated some 40 miles south of Frisco between the San Isabel and Pike national forests. In other words, it’s in the middle of nowhere. In other other words, it’s a really difficult place to shoot a feature film. “Yeah,…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Another Earth is ostensibly a film about second chances

There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning co-writer and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…

Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds switch bodies and talk shit in The Change-Up

A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave, and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly…

A close opening weekend at the box office for two really shitty movies

As the summer blockbuster season winds down to its weakest dregs, two terrible movies — one about James Bond as a cowboy battling aliens with a wristwatch that shoots lasers, the other about a group of zany blue anthropomorphic creatures who substitute their name for various other words — vie…

Cowboys, aliens and the five worst “vs.” movies of all time

Cowboys and Aliens, out today, tells the charming and classic story of what happens when cowboys meet aliens: They all shoot each other. It stars Daniel Craig, who’s British, which makes sense because while Wyatt Earp was shooting dudes in Tombstone, the Brits were drinking crumpets or whatever and signing…

The Smurfs is this week’s most ridiculous trailer

It’s a mildly fun fact that the original gimmick of the Smurfs — created by Belgian cartoonist Peyo way back in the ’50s — was the “Smurf language”, in which the small blue characters substitute that word for whatever verb, noun or adjective, depending on context. But it didn’t really…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…