When you put a pair of losers in uniforms, at the end of the day they’re still losers. Best friends and roommates Justin (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Ryan (Jake Johnson) learn that the hard way, but not without finding some joy in the fantasy that you can become the success…
Titles don’t get more ironic than The Expendables 3. The franchise claims to be about death-seeking mercenaries yet stars ’80s action heroes, who refuse to die. Three films in, everyone in the sprawling team is still alive and ass kicking, save for Bruce Willis, whose million-dollar-a-day asking salary has caused…
The Giver is more simple and raw than the rest of today’s teen dystopias that try to cram in unnecessary backstory and love triangles. (Original author Lois Lowry published her novel in 1993, which makes it officially the cool aunt of Katniss and the kids.) The story picks up several…
Roland Emmerich’s 1998 take on the kaiju classic Godzilla is rightly reviled by both fans of the original and anyone else who hasn’t suffered brain trauma. But among one select audience — fans of RiffTrax, to be specific — it’s been in great demand for years. When RiffTrax Live: Godzilla…
The Polish landscape is cold, cloudy and bleak, and serves as a perfect backdrop for films that mine the existential frustrations of the human experience, including the 21 recently restored films in Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, a series that begins tonight at the Sie FilmCenter. Many of…
In Calvary, Brendan Gleeson plays a Catholic priest who plods through a rustic Irish village that’s more brutal than beautiful. The beach is gray, the waves are choppy, and the wind whips his ankle-length black cassock as though every step were a fight against nature. In some ways, it is…
Lasse Hallström has become an expert at making mom-jeans movies, non-threatening pictures in which headstrong women find love just when they think it’s too late (Once Around), take the upper hand with their cheating husbands (Something to Talk About), and turn small, French villages topsy-turvy by opening chocolate shops (Chocolat)…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is to not have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Perhaps fitting for a celebration of a musician whose polyrhythmic extravaganzas tended to run twenty-plus minutes, Alex Gibney’s doc Finding Fela takes a while to get started. The opening scenes focus on rehearsals for Broadway’s Fela!, and early on, Gibney shows us more footage of stage-Fela Sahr Ngaujah than of…
Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis). This is only the second presentation to open at the Rule Gallery since the untimely death of Robin Rule late last year. It was important to Rule that the gallery continue, so three longtime associates — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hilary Morris — are carrying…
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and…
Quentin Tarantino’s movies have incurred the wrath of many. In Newsweek, Daniel Mendelsohn accused Inglorious Basterds of turning Jews into Nazis, arguing that the film was cashing in on the fragile nature of historical memory. Spike Lee has criticized Tarantino for nearly two decades. He went so far as to…
With summer fading away, the studios are releasing the last blockbusters and many moviegoers are dreading the pre-Oscar lull. Fear not, cinephiles. Denver’s movie scene is vibrant. This month you can huddle up and catch a doc at Sports Authority Field, drink a beer and watch a horror flick at…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against Internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy. [Subscribe…
Colorado’s independent film scene is booming, says filmmaker and photographer Ralph-Michael Giordano, whose exhibition A Colorado Tribute to Classic Hollywood will be featured at Tenn Street Coffee and Books on First Friday, as part of the Tennyson Street Artwalk. Giordano has spent the last six months rebooting classic photographs of…
If you’re afraid that your kids’ entertainment isn’t sufficiently weird, there’s help out there. The second season of Gravity Falls kicks off August 1 on the Disney Channel (don’t let that scare you off!), and there’s no better way to indoctrinate your kids into the world of the surreal and…
Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball? Jackie Robinson, of course. Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, two other black ball players who joined the majors in 1947, aren’t remembered as well, although they experienced the same brutal racism that Robinson did. And although Robinson is often…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
Outside in 303.This summer feature at the Museo de las Amesricas is absolutely spectacular, with each of the included artists being given lots of space to stretch out. Conceived and organized by Museo director Maruca Salazar with help from the Denver Art Museum’s Gwen Chanzit, the show looks at a…
Beware the movie that’s Fun with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist — a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of…
In Tate Taylor’s subtly extraordinary James Brown biopic Get On Up, Chadwick Boseman plays the man who, seemingly just by willing it to be so, became the Godfather of Soul. Get On Up isn’t a perfect picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don’t quite pay off. But…
