This has been a grueling election season, with the television full of depressing news reports and endless political ads. The best way to avoid them? Program a movie, one that might give you a more honest look at elections, where you can augh at the irony, cringe at the realities…
Each November, cinephiles around the state gather for the Starz Denver Film Festival, one of the year’s hottest film events. Because the festival has an stellar lineup of directors, actors and critics escorting viewers through the best contemporary and historical cinema, it can easily overshadow other must-see movie events around…
Despite the state’s efforts to beef up its movie industry, it’s still unusual to see a crew actually filming on location in Denver. And it’s even rarer that one of those productions announces it’s holding open auditions for scores of extras — all ages and types, no experience necessary –…
Horror films take place in an alternate universe where logic disappears. The villain comes back to life, the car doesn’t start and those damn kids always go into the dark basement alone. Instead of spending your Halloween partying with people in Ebola patient costumes, choose a classic horror movie franchise…
If you want to summon some ghosts, sip on witches’ brew and watch a satanic smorgasbord of documentary, experimental and narrative shorts, head to Glob for Cinema Contra tonight . Film programmer Anthony Buchanan promises that the ghost of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey will host this unique mix…
Jake Gyllenhaal, not a particularly bulky guy to begin with, dropped twenty pounds or so to play a Los Angeles misfit who finds his calling as a freelance crime videographer in Dan Gilroy’s nervy thriller Nightcrawler. Even when Robert De Niro does it, weight change isn’t acting — it’s the…
Director Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie’s a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as argument…
Perhaps Ruben Östlund’s most sophisticated thought experiment yet, the provocative and wise Force Majeure is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses: masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous. Östlund takes as his subject (and satirical target) a comfortably moneyed Swedish family — Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
This essay contains a spoiler or two for John Wick. There’s too much violence in movies today — too much of the wrong kind, though if you asked me what the “right” kind is, I would only be able to tell you that I know it when I see it…
Dog lovers and fans of the beyond-understated charisma of Keanu Reeves have a tough choice when it comes to John Wick. Those who count themselves among the former should know that the Cutest Beagle EVER gets offed — off-screen, but still — in the first twenty minutes. That’s not my…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart, Merrin (Juno Temple), has been murdered underneath the…
When we first meet the title character in Olive Kitteridge, she considers the revolver in her hands and looks up at the cloudless sky above the woods one last time. The 25-year journey (and the accumulation of mistakes and bad luck therein) that leads the elderly Olive to that moment…
Keanu Reeves in John WickOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes). We also scoop out some time for John Wick, which helps restore our faith in violent movies, Horns, Nightcrawler…
Some folks are always jumping the gun when it comes to holiday decorations. Still, the idea of trotting out the Christmas ornaments before Halloween arrives is so bizarre that it’s just not done — particularly in oh-so-stylish Park Hill. Unless, of course, you happen to be shooting a movie. A…
Calling all aspiring screenwriters! The Colorado Screenplay Mentoring Program is now accepting submissions of screenplays from local writers looking for feedback on their works-in-progress. From now until December 15, the program will accept up to fifty screenplays on a first-come, first-served basis. Each screenplay will be reviewed by an expert,…
Nightmares tap into our subconscious and scare us based on our feelings, which is why fear knows no language barriers. So, while the world’s cultures are blaringly different, our terrors are universal. The world of foreign horror cinema is also extensive and terrifying, and a plethora of American scary movies…
Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves that we’re not yet living in a “post-racial America”: Forget for a moment that there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class and economics that we haven’t been able to put a bandage on, let alone…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced, here. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of a wrong man accused — or…
In Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton pours all of Batman’s simmering disquietude into a different form: that of Riggan Thomson, a has-been actor who hopes to reclaim his reputation by staging an ambitious Broadway show, an adaptation — one he’s written himself — of Raymond Carver’s “What…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the title of film’s most vigilant observer of American…
