Almost every city has some sort of microcinema — a small-scale, do-it-yourself movie screening series showcasing experimental, oddball, archival and underground films and videos. But Denver needs more of them, says Anthony Buchanan, so he’s launching Cinema Contra, his own wandering microcinema that will be doing monthly screenings in different…
Jaws dropped when it was announced that up-and-coming filmmaker Rian Johnson would direct episodes VIII and IX of the Star Wars series. Sure, Johnson has created beloved genre films like The Brothers Bloom, but doesn’t Star Wars warrant a bigger name? Keith Garcia, creative manager for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema…
The Boulder International Fringe Festival is one of many fringe fests around the world where cultural gatekeepers have opened the dam and flooded audiences with playwrights, filmmakers, dancers, artists and curators showing off their works without censorship. Nobody gets turned away. Anything goes. The joy and trouble for audiences is…
When the International Film Series launched in 1941, there were no debates about the merits of film verses digital distribution. There were no videos, no DVDs, no Blu-rays and no digital files. Film was film. You could touch it and scratch it and cut it and paint it and what…
Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema is everything the size-obsessed movie industry is not. The screen is small. The theater fits no more than four. The longest film lasts seven minutes. Instead of projecting the latest digital files, Gravey shows movies with an old Super 8 mm, home projector. Forgoing booming…
Jim Havey’s soon-to-be-finished feature documentary, The Great Divide, aims to tell the tangled story of water in Colorado — a subject as vast as the state and the eight states that Colorado supplies water to. He’s looking at the acequias (ditch irrigation systems) in the San Luis Valley, the export…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio loves the media and the media loves him. So does the Republican political establishment. So does the Tea Party. Through his six terms in office, the 82-year-old sheriff has perfected the media stunt and used public relation campaigns to keep journalists on his side –…
Even in the most conservative areas, theater provides a home for the misfits, the oddballs, the outcasts and the rebels. In his new documentary, Skanks, David McMahon follows a group of performers as they prepare to perform Billy Ray Brewton’s raunchy drag musical Skanks in a One Horse Town, in…
What happens when a festival throws out the gatekeepers and unleashes a torrent of pure creative expression on a city? For the tenth year in a row, the Boulder International Fringe Festival is experimenting with the answer to this question. The fest “brings artists from all over the country and…
With the DocuWest International Film Festival kicking off tonight, movie buffs throughout the city are talking about their favorite documentaries. To honor the genre’s long and varied history, we’ve compiled a list of ten must-see films for doc lovers. Some of these movies are famous, some are notorious and others…
Writer Irene Vilar came from a political family. Her mother, who devoted herself to the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, spent decades in prison for political actions. Her family had two Episcopalian priests involved in liberation theology, a Latin American religious movement whose followers read the Bible as a Marxist…
Between legal weed and eco-friendly businesses, Colorado’s enthusiasm for green rivals none. But break out the pink and rainbows and the state suddenly gets squeamish. Even before the word “homosexuality” was invented in the late nineteenth century (French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that it first appeared in 1870), the newly…
Boulder filmmaker iKE ALLEN told friends that he was hoping to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show of country music. Days later, he got a call from Reverend Yolanda, a New York City-based drag queen and minister who was using her campy performances to spread the word of the Lord…
When you walk into the Black Book Gallery for the opening of Oh, The Places You Will Go! on Friday night, the lights will be turned off and the only thing you will see are the fantastical light-boxes of husband-wife duo Hari and Deepti. See also: Filmmaker Guy Maddin on…
On Tuesday morning, Republican Attorney General John Suthers, who discusses his long, hot summer debating the same-sex marriage issue in this week’s print edition, announced his candidacy for mayor of Colorado Springs. Minutes before embarking on a water tour of Colorado, Suthers took a few minutes to speak with Westword…
There are plenty of documentary festivals east of the Mississippi, which is why it’s so important that DocuWest has carved out space for nonfiction films in our region. “What we want to do is make DocuWest and Denver a hub for documentary filmmakers, documentary film lovers and those who really…
“The higher the hair, the closer to God,” says Reverend Yolanda, the campy, drag-queen star of the new documentary Reverend Yolanda’s Old Time Gospel Hour — The Movie, billed as the Rocky Horror Picture Show of country gospel music. “Yolanda and Dolly Parton keep the wig makers of America in…
All summer long, champions and foes of same-sex marriage have barraged Colorado Attorney General John Suthers with phone calls and e-mails. Boxes of messages and missives fill a corner of his communications director’s office. She reports the public’s comments to her boss, and he shrugs them off. Suthers wants to…
Art naturally evolved from representation (pictures of things) toward abstraction, argued modernist art critic Clement Greenberg and his fellow formalists. Portraiture and landscape painting be damned: In pure art, paintings do nothing but express their essence as painting. But in the 1960s, painting about painting fell out of style and…
Denver movie lovers should invest in some eye drops and caffeine pills and brace themselves for a nonstop month of cinematic bliss. To get a sense of just how much is going on, consider all the festivals that deserve mention yet didn’t make this list: The Southern Colorado Film Festival,…
After having her wanderlust fulfilled by a tornado that slams her into a Technicolor world brimming with flying monkeys, munchkins, green-faced and sweet-as-pie witches, crabby apple trees, a timid lion, a rusting robot and a wannabe brainiac stuffed with straw, country girl Dorothy recants her desire to ditch Kansas and…
With New Belgium Brewery’s Tour d’ Fat just a few weeks away, the Fort Collins-based brewery is hosting The Cycle-In Cinema on Platte, by REI at Confluence Park, to pave the way for the annual festival. “This week we will be showing The Goonies and next week we will show…
