The heat is getting unbearable (finally) – all the more reason to go inside and have some good, geeky fun. August is full of great options to beat the heat while celebrating the geek, from fantasy legends visiting Denver to a whirlwind of sharks. Here are the month’s ten best…
How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A LEGO Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: LEGO construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like the Country Squire from hell and sought the family-bonding experience by driving cross-country to a mythical mega-amusement park known as Walley World. If…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played by…
This is a great time to be gay in America — and if you’re not, it’s an even greater time to sit back and learn about your queer friends and neighbors. Film is the great equalizer, and tomorrow through Sunday, the Denver Film Society’s annual Cinema Q Film Festival at…
We run down the ten best movies of 2015 (so far) on this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club. Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, joined by Amy Nicholson at LA Weekly, each share a few of their favorites on this mid-year (well for Hollywood, anyway)…
The pizza joint Shakey’s in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the pair…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, respectively) catch up at a doughnut joint…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on, too — but…
Silents never actually were. According to composer Rodney Sauer, musical accompanists always played for silent film screenings, a feat that will be replicated by his Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra this week when it underscores the innovative 1930 German film People on Sunday as part of Boulder’s Chautauqua Silent Film…
If science fiction and economic trends can agree on anything, it’s that robots are destined to become our merciless overlords. You can prepare yourself for this horrific inevitability, or even study how you might fight it, with a trip to the Longmont Museum for its new robocentric film series, launching…
Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
While Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new movie Trainwreck is “occasionally very funny, it also feels carefully constructed to make its points, chief among them that men can get away with all kinds of bad or crazy behavior that women can’t,” writes Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her review…
Does gay have a particular sound? Is there a certain way that gay men speak that our brains read as a dead giveaway to their sexual orientation? The new film Do I Sound Gay?, opening Friday at the Mayan Theatre, explores the myth and science behind the queer dialect ,…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here’s 100 or so minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. Besides that, Mr. Holmes…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
Dr. Jeffrey Young is a casting director’s dream. There’s the veterinarian’s look: long, greying hair, a thick mustache and kanji tattoos inked on his biceps, sculpted from years working as a track-and-field coach at North High. Then there’s the fact that, a quarter-century into his practice, Young still isn’t shy…
Imagine if Donald Trump wanted to reboot his disastrous presidential-campaign-announcement month to start over as a younger man with real hair. In Tarsem Singh’s Self/less, Trump could hire the medical geniuses of Phoenix Biogenic to transfer his aging brain into a strapping-hot bod for $250 million — the price of…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was one of the first great tragedies of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the twentieth — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility…
Dana Nachman’s Batkid Begins marches in with the mini-movie you’ve already seen. (Unless, as Bruce Wayne suffered in The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve spent months in a hole.) On a November weekday in San Francisco — a/k/a Gotham-by-the-Bay — five-year-old cancer survivor Miles Scott rode shotgun in a Lamborghini Batmobile,…
