This summer, dozens of grown adults spent hours upon hours of valuable time playing with LEGOs toward the goal of winning mild fame and glory in Build-A-Brickbuster Pixelfest, an international film festival and contest celebrating the art of making stop-motion animation with tiny toys, held over the weekend of August…
In the small (literally) but fascinating world of people who make art using GI Joes, Gio Toninelo is pretty much a god. The founder and curator of GI Joe Fest, an international GI Joe-centric stop-motion film festival that branched out of Denver last year to locations as far-flung as Slovakia…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
More than just the Hollywood It Girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting Big Scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account, thoroughly post-empire — she doesn’t need…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns that her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel that Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as…
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…
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…
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…
The Sci-Fi Film Series is getting down to its final two weeks, and this Wednesday, they’ll be showing one of our favorites, Moon, at 7 p.m. at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax. The purpose of the series is pretty simple: show off some great science fiction movies and provide an intellectual introduction…
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…
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…
Alright, so we didn’t like Soul Surfer that much. But they can’t all be gems, and when it comes to elevating fellow Denverites into the echelons of dumb awards, we’re always willing to help a brother out — so take, if you will, a moment from your busy day and…
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,…
