Animal Farm. Germinal Stage’s new theater — only a few miles from the one the company left last year, and even smaller — is cozy, welcoming and workable. Walking in feels a bit like entering a time warp. The Germinal faithful, along with a few young initiates, throng the lobby,…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’s fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in…
The Drop, the richly textured, beautifully acted film collaboration between Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) and novelist-turned-screenwriter Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), takes place in the present, but its heart lies in the noirish past of both movies and literature. In that shadowy realm, tough guys are endlessly quotable, and…
Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut has such a strong Jacques Demy influence that he might have called it The Young Girl of Glasgow. The Belle & Sebastian singer began God Help the Girl as a 2009 song cycle that follows the troubled Eve as she transmutes her anguish into sparkling pop…
The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…
Married women over thirty, here’s a pitch for a movie: My Dinner With Idris. You never thought it would happen to you, but one rainy night when your handsome and successful but distracted husband who doesn’t appreciate you is out of town, Idris Elba (The Wire, Mandela: Long Walk to…
This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.” Ninety minutes later, Smith responded: “Not me. Been hacked. Proud to be bi-curious, not brave enough to commit.” But the Internet already knew that…
What’s fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle, he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
There is nothing traditional about the programming at Off-Center@The Jones — including how this interactive sendup of oft-stuffy theater announces its programming every year: with a big bash. Tonight’s Off-Center Season Release Party promises to be a wild evening of live trailers, costumes, surprises and plenty of free beer. “It’s…
We’d all like to imagine we’ll be zombie-murdering heroes when the dead walk the earth, but the truth is that most of us will just want to hole up somewhere and drink until it’s over. Finally, there’s an event aimed at those willing to embrace a drunken slide into the…
Now that you’ve geared up for snowboard season at the Labor Day bargain bins and are pining for the first powder dump of the season, Snowboard on the Block has the fix you need to get you through to opening day, still at least a month away. The second annual…
“When you open the streets, you open minds,” says Hillary Griffith of Boulder Green Streets, and that’s the thinking behind the Boulder Green Streets Ciclovia, which will close down three miles of Boulder streets to traffic today for six hours of building community and just taking time out to play…
Vintage takes a trip into the heyday of silent film in Mack and Mabel, the story of director Mack Sennett and his love affair with actress Mabel Normand. Told through flashbacks as an older Sennett reminisces about the coming of the talkies, the play was based on an idea by…
Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective is the closest thing to a blockbuster this summer at the Denver Art Museum, and it’s a sweet one: On tour from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition of nearly 100 works by Wesselmann, who died ten years ago, opens today…
Boulder, which already hosts the annual Conference on World Affairs, one of the greatest interdisciplinary symposia of all time, proved last year that it was also a good fit for the Americas Latino Eco-Festival. Today, ALEF, which bills itself as “a Latino South by Southwest,” rolls into the college town…
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are enfants terribles whose rhythm, aesthetic and sensibilities have informed everything from cinema to sketch comedy and deodorant advertising in the years since Tom Goes to the Mayor debuted on Adult Swim nearly a decade ago. Gallows humor abounds in the pair’s Bedtime Stories, a…
During his 27 years working on the Uptown Sampler restaurant crawl (including fourteen as event director), Paul Weiss has seen Denver’s Uptown neighborhood blossom, becoming a real community instead of a transient wasteland. “When I first started doing this, Uptown was not a desirable neighborhood. No one walked there, not…
When we think of Japanese prints, we tend to envision the “floating world” woodblock prints of nineteenth-century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige, who influenced the composition style of Edgar Degas and other impressionist painters. But the print tradition still thrives today in Japan, where changing printmaking technology and updated environments…
Director Maruca Salazar never really thought of the Museo de las Américas, her Latino-culture stronghold that holds everything from folk art to fine art, as a place for street art — at least not until a group of local graffiti artists met with her a couple of years ago. They’d…
Lower downtown has changed a lot over the past three decades — and photographer Kim Allen, a Denver native, has been there to document it all. He was shooting photographs of Denver’s decrepit viaducts and gritty warehouses before the area was nicknamed LoDo, before it became an official historic district…
