The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways, it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Like Dazed & Confused or The Breakfast Club, this is a film about just how weird the extraordinarily normal kids are — kids like you. The teen…
Forget the Orange Is the New Black bingewatch you’d planned for this week, because your eyes need to stay focused on one of the most ambitious but exciting festivals to come to the Mile High City. SeriesFest: Season One is a brand-new festival coming out of Denver – the birthplace…
Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen-cancer weepie ever made — if there even is a best teen-cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a Wimpy…
For film fanatics, it boggles the mind that a generation of movie-watchers have no idea what seeing cinema on 35mm film is like. The phasing out of this grand format, along with the slow death of the repertory movie house, is the focus of Julia Marchese’s documentary Out Of Print,…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returned June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
Denver is an ideal place for outdoor movies; our normally cool, dry and clear evenings make for superb viewing. While the metro area once sported more than two dozen drive-ins, it’s now down to two: the 88 Drive-In Theatre and the Denver Mart Drive-In, which opens June 12. But there…
One of the funniest things in Live From New York!, the latest repackaging of Saturday Night Live history, comes from Amy Poehler, describing the institution that made her a star: “SNL — the show your parents used to have sex to that now you watch during the day.” Something almost…
In its last moments, Amy Berg’s exposé of sexual predators among Hollywood’s management classes offers a curious disclaimer: “The filmmakers acknowledge that this is not a gender based issue,” a title reads, just before the closing credits. “We chose to tell these specific stories, but they are representations of a…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier),…
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy. “In L.A., people would say, ‘Oh, I was…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony, McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt. But in the years since, Hollywood has continued to…
It’s appropriate that when the lights go down on Wednesday for the start of the thirtieth annual Chautauqua Silent Film Series, they’ll do so in an auditorium that’s been screening movies longer than any other venue in Colorado. On July 21, 1898, the Chautauqua Auditorium hosted a traveling exhibitor displaying…
To try to explain an Everything Is Terrible! show is to try to describe the most haunting fever dream that has ever rolled through your brain: It’s like the terror of sleep paralysis, but with a weird comedy aftertaste. The artists behind EIT!, led by the mysterious shadow figure of…
