In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
Director John Carpenter has made some of the most memorable films of the last forty years, and one of the things that made them memorable was the music: Carpenter has been the music composer for his entire catalog — and beyond. Now Carpenter’s bringing his music into a different kind…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…
The world-famous Sundance Film Festival and its film-incubating Sundance Labs are kicking off the sixth year of Film Forward, a touring program of indie films and filmmakers, in Denver with the Denver Film Society, which will host two free screenings on February 22 and 23 at the Sie FilmCenter. Sundance…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…
Surrounding states may be more popular places to film movies, but Colorado has one of the biggest, most burgeoning film scenes around. Not only do we have the chance to watch great films every day, but there are dozens of festivals in the Denver area and around the state dedicated…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
The Boulder International Film Festival just announced that Oscar-nominated actor Bruce Dern (The Hateful Eight, Nebraska, Coming Home) will be honored at the twelfth annual festival. A Conversation with and Tribute to Bruce Dern is set for Friday, March 4, at the Boulder Theater, 2032 14th Street. Dern’s first screen credit…
Filmmaker Oliver Stone was one of Hollywood’s most controversial directors in the ’90s, tackling stories rife with conspiracy theories and often testing the mores of the American viewing public. Now a new biography about Stone and a new film by him, focusing on Edward Snowden, is bringing Stone back into…
HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl…
A guy I grew up with had the superpower to make anything dirty. No matter what you’d say to him, he’d manage to make it about his dick, or about anal sex, or about how girls — so he had heard — smelled like fish. I asked him what he…
Three years ago, Michael Moore wrapped up a TV interview about the Sandy Hook massacre and asked the producers to leave him alone. “You guys call me every time there’s a school shooting,” he sighed. He had, after all, made Bowling for Columbine, which blasted the NRA and the nightly…
What do we think of when we think of Jewish film? For three generations, the grainy black-and-white footage of the Holocaust has dominated the collective mind, a trauma that will take the passing of generations to dissipate. Recent Jewish-themed films however, reflect a resilient and rebounding worldwide Jewish population, displaying…
Christmas 2016 is still more than ten months away — but we already know there’s a big, dirty present waiting under the tree. Legendary filmmaker John Waters is coming to town — to the Boulder Theater, to be exact — on December 7, and tickets go on sale at 10 a.m…
It started with a Google search for the world’s best LEGO maker and ended with commercial air time during the third quarter of Super Bowl 50. Last year Elevation Digital Media founders Chris Lewis and Jon Stevenson were tasked with creating a series of video spots for Arrow Electronics, the…
Hey, Denver drag fans! Are you ready for your close-up? Do you want to be part of a locally shot music video for one of your favorite, world-renowned drag personalities? Then mark your calendars for Wednesday, February 10, at Tracks Denver. The video shoot is looking for 100 “sexy” people…
The biggest story at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was the record-breaking bidding war for The Birth of a Nation, a prestige biopic about rebellious slave Nat Turner. When Fox Searchlight snatched it for $17.5 million — $5 million more than any other flick in the festival’s history — their…
You’re probably right if you think you might get a couple laughs out of a movie titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You’re also right if you’ve guessed that this gung-ho but cruddy-looking mashup fails from A to Z: It’s neither good Austen nor good zombie flick. But in those…
