Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
In Netflix’s new teen-suicide drama series 13 Reasons Why, pretty-boy Marcus (Steven Silver) tells good-guy Clay (Dylan Minnette) that whatever the kids did to Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) to make her kill herself was no different than what happens to any other girl in any other high school everywhere. And…
It’s a good thing Jonathan Banks has such an interesting face. At the beginning of the third season of Better Call Saul, we spend a lot of quiet time with Banks’ surly, crooked-nosed cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut of Breaking Bad fame, watching as he dismantles his own car and works out…
Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be. This big-budget adaptation of the Japanese manga and anime classic (Masamune Shirow’s comic premiered in the late 1980s, Mamoru Oshii’s highly influential first film version in 1995)…
Catch up on prior seasons of Vanderpump Rules on Hulu. Part one of the season five reunion airs Monday, April 3 on Bravo. Detractors of reality TV pooh-pooh the genre as a vacuous cesspool that celebrates crass idiocy and normalizes bad behavior that leads to societal horrors like our current…
April showers bring May flowers, but you don’t have to wait until next month for cinematic roses, because we’ve got a bouquet of the best film events in our city, right here.
Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan, of which four episodes have aired so far, is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first…
This April, let us celebrate the glory of the flowers blossoming in vaginal fashion by only highlighting shows created by women. The list will be shorter than usual because Hollywood hates women, and we aren’t allowed to create magical stuff, and the world is worse off because of it. Anyways,…
Cutting ties with the MS-13 gang proved to be harder for Gerardo Lopez than leaving his home town of Los Angeles.
Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens…
The premise for Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery is so simple and poetic that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before: A scientist discovers definitive proof of an afterlife, and the world responds with mass suicides. McDowell, who scored a sleeper hit with The One I Love — which…
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is available on demand. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House streams on Netflix. When writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins asked his musician brother Elvis to score his first film — a demonic-possession horror pic starring Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton and Emma Roberts called The…
CHIPS is the latest kitschy-yet-beloved cop show to get remodeled on the big screen as a bromantic buddy comedy. However, unlike the way the movie versions of Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street played up those shows’ alleged homoeroticism for ironic, lighthearted laughs, CHIPS lets it be known from…
As Denver continues to grow into a newer, bigger and more expensive city, local artists press on, creating art about the changes being seen and felt.
Niki Caro has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. To judge by the trailer, her low-budget breakthrough feature Whale Rider (2003) seemed a straightforward children’s drama about a girl overcoming the odds — tame, commercial Disney fare. But the film itself proved…
The Boss Baby might look, at first, like any other major studio animation release. Directed by DreamWorks vet Tom McGrath (Madagascar, Megamind), the movie hits all the expected notes: the enduring importance of family, the persistence of untrustworthy/clueless adults, and the inherent hilarity of shoehorning David Mamet dialogue into a…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters airs March 26, PBS Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived…
One of the sly jokes underpinning this striking indie apocalypse: If everyone on Earth vanished while you were vacationing in Iceland, how long before you would notice? Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan’s subtly comic drama, shot with a gliding camera and a pleasing minimalist style, proceeds from that premise, stranding…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
Don’t let the 70-degree weather fool you: winter isn’t over. Oh, enjoy your shorts-and-tank-top days while you can, for sure. Take the dog for a walk, check out all the shades of browns in the parks, put those boots away and break out the sneakers. But chances are good that there will come a night or a weekend when winter reminds us here in Denver that it’s not dead yet. And there will come a reckoning.Fortunately, all you need to do to survive that reckoning is to fire up the Netflix queue, and check out some of the stuff—all currently available to stream—that you’ve been missing while you were outside gallivanting in the weird Winter (and early Spring!) warmth.
