“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of eighty, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharp’s suit…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing straw man, knee-jerk cynicism —…
There’s no empowerment message embedded in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, no “Girls can do anything!” cheerleader vibe. That’s why it’s wonderful. This is a straight, no-chaser fairy story, a picture to be downed with pleasure. It worries little about sending the wrong message and instead trusts us to decode its politics,…
It’s an ironic truth that directors fascinated by robots tend to make inhuman movies. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to last year’s Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question…
In Boulder, it seems that climbing culture has always been around – the need to wear stretchy pants, to make impossible ascents, to perform crazy feats of gravity-defying derring-do. There, climbing is a kind of hypercompetitive Zen performance art. It’s fitting then that a new, epic climbing-history documentary, Valley Uprising,…
There are five reasons why Fox’s Empire has become a breakout hit, and on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we run down why the show, introduced as a mid-season replacement, has surged to nearly 14 million viewers an episode by its eighth week. Joining Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl…
Almost immediately after it was released, the 2011 stealth hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became more of a punchline than a movie. Who knew “older” people were so starved for pictures featuring gorgeously shot exotic locales, not to mention people falling in love, falling out of love or desperately…
Sundance is over and Oscar season — but the show will go on at local movie theaters. In March, screens will light up with two Alfred Hitchcock classics, several film festivals and a survey of Italian neorealism. Audiences will also be able to spend an entire weekend with one of the…
Beginning March 2, Mondays will truly be a drag as Tracks Denver hosts not only a free viewing party of every new episode of Season 7, but holds its own intensive drag competition to find Denver’s Ultimate Queen. Come for RuPaul’s patented annual drama — but stay for the homegrown…
Leonard Nimoy has died at the age of 83. Both on camera and off, he exemplified the best of what Star Trek, and thus humanity, could represent. Part of that was Trek’s writing, of course. But it was Nimoy who took what was on the page — often repaired what…
There was an awkward moment between Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson and her mom, Melanie Griffith, on the red carpet before the Oscars on Sunday. But the world got to see Johnson’s impressive talent for pretending uncomfortable situations don’t seem to bother her (see also: Fifty Shades of…
In a cinematic universe where the rules for viability are changing almost daily, the film festival is becoming an endangered species. Less than 25 percent of them make it past the sixth year. But next week, Boulder International Film Festival will celebrate its eleventh season, which runs from March 5…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating and generally making life…
If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’s Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…
Is it possible to like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice and emptiness, and in places it’s smart and astringently funny. Yet it seems to be fighting its own bone…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Connoisseurs of bad film know that The Room deserves a special place within the canon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. By now the infamous film’s journey from director/writer/star Tommy Wiseau’s fever dream to the big screen has been well-documented, but nothing captures the story quite like producer and co-star Greg Sestero’s The…
Shocker of all shockers: the Fifty Shades of Grey movie sucked so hard it left a gaping hole where my soul used to be. Not that I didn’t anticipate maximum suckage since the book was also terrible, but I suppose I held out a vestige of hope that maybe the…
Kevin Costner eases white America into the now with McFarland, USA, we hear about the Berlin Film Festival’s highs (Queen of Earth) and lows (Knight of Cups), and dip into the lukewarm waters of a second Hot Tub Time Machine movie. Also, there’s much praise for teen comedy The DUFF and…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman), “Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb…
Five years ago, four losers passed out in a jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…
