Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
Clueless rich guy Tom Perkins rightly became the laughingstock of the Internet last year after comparing America’s “war on one-percenters” to the Nazi Kristallnacht. However detestably fatuous Perkins is in real life, it must be admitted that he’d make a fascinating fictional character, perhaps in a Greek tragedy about a…
If you’ve ever played music or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
Celine Sciamma’s pained, thrilling observational tale of growing up broke and black in slab-like Paris flats is no rebuke to Boyhood, but its besties-dancing-to-Rihanna rhapsody eats the lunch of that bit where Richard Linklater has Ethan Hawke drone on about Wings. They sing: “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky!”…
T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month, but that was clearly before he got a good look at all the sweet geek events happening in Denver in the coming month: Classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies, two conventions and our own homegrown horror-film festival are all on the calendar…
Fandom is a universal language. Once a TV, book or game series has sunk its hooks into you, you begin to understand all those other weirdos. That’s part of what makes local documentary Mile High Magic a must-see for anyone who even dabbles in geek, whether they’ve ever picked up…
Get Hard, Etan Cohen’s comedy about a white stockbroker who hires a black man to prepare him for a ten-year stretch in San Quentin, is like a spoon that’s almost-but-not-yet sharpened into a shiv. With just a little more effort, it could kill. Judging by the poster, in which star…
Some years ago, I went to see Tom Jones perform. He sang all the hits, but I was unnerved by his new walnut-brown goatee. It looked freshly trimmed and fake, like he’d ripped it off Evil Spock backstage. Superstars aren’t allowed to change. Even the fans who love them insist…
Noah Baumbach has always had a dash of hypochondria, but in the last few years, his doctor’s visits have changed. “If you’re a worrier like I am, or Ben,” he says, referring to Ben Stiller, the star of his 2010 movie Greenberg, “you’re used to going, ‘Is this something that…
No matter how you end up feeling about it, there sure is a lot of movie in Mommy, Xavier Dolan’s exuberant melodrama about an emotional firecracker of a teenager who, after being kicked out of a specialized school for setting the cafeteria on fire, goes home to live with his…
We’re two films into the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel, Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very special…
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night, a shoot-’em-up about an out-to-pasture hit man desperate to keep his boss and best friend from whacking his son, is humid with testosterone. It’s the sort of film where a woman accidentally caught by the camera practically apologizes and scurries away from the lens. When…
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths — you can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece…
One of the year’s best films, Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live. “We live in a country that…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
Cinematic girl power returns to the Sie FilmCenter on Tuesday, March 17, as the Voices Women + Film Festival begins its fifth edition with a globetrotting slate of new films, filmmakers and discussions by, for and about women — one of the most underserved festival audiences. “I think this is…
“There are some tough films on the program,” says Boulder Jewish Film Festival artistic director Kathryn Bernheimer. “I can program challenging movies because we have a really great audience that is willing to engage intellectually and is adventurous artistically.” The third annual edition of the week-long celebration of films focusing on…
“Mark Twain once said that boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he’s successful, can rub shoulders with royalty,” says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out nineteen opponents in a row. “Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king,…
The season five debut of Game of Thrones is still a month away, which leaves you plenty of time to catch up and/or get reacquainted with its complex and detailed interweaving storylines. One great chance to do exactly that is Saturday, March 14, when the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City…
It seems as if, for every ten issue-oriented documentaries that essentially function as long-form magazine articles with images attached, we get perhaps one doc that exemplifies the methods of “direct cinema” — the observational mode of documentary filmmaking that allows audiences to observe from a detached remove. That mode is…
