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Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…

Something in the Air‘s Paris plot is a gorgeous ode to youth

Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous, freewheeling, semi-autobiographical Something in the Air is an ode to both youth’s universal qualities and the specifics of Assayas’s youth in particular. The picture opens in the suburbs just outside Paris in 1971, among a group of teenage students still energized by the explosive student and worker…

Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D Gatsby is both over the top and underwhelming

There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…

At Any Price‘s farm-and-family drama ticks with a beating heart

Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to project whatever…

Farewell to Ray Harryhausen, master of the handmade fantasy

In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and were also, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I found myself more and more often invoking the name of Ray Harryhausen, who died on Tuesday, May 7,…

Hey, Hollywood: Enough with the father-son dramas

In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…

Can Uwe Boll finally get some respect?

Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days, he prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are…

Making the Cut

All semester, students at the Colorado Film School have been writing, developing and producing their own original short films. Tonight they’ll unveil these projects to the public at the Spring 2013 Student Show, an opportunity to present their films in high resolution on the big screen. “The nicest thing is…

Dark Dreams

A young woman with a supernatural talent for finding things goes looking for trouble and discovers it in the form of a monstrous man who uses children for his own dark ends. This is the plot of Joe Hill’s new novel NOS4A2. The best-selling horror novelist’s third tale delves into…

Generation Gap

Part biopic, part fabled rock tale, Greetings From Tim Buckley, opening tonight at the Sie FilmCenter, tells the story of the connection between the singer, who died in 1975 at the age of 28, and his son, Jeff Buckley, who never knew his famous father. Set in New York City,…

Wham Bammer

With her menagerie of voices and characters and keen insight into human psychology, comedian Maria Bamford has been a darling of fans of smart, eccentric humor since the early 1990s. Bamford began her career while in college, and her cartoonish portrayals of secretarial and temporary work, as well as glimpses…

A Real Indy

When Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala started their epic Raiders of the Lost Ark remake, they were a pair of preteens with limitless ambition and absolutely zero idea how to make a movie. By the time they’d finished Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation seven years and several near-catastrophes…

Riding the RiNo

The ever-changing RiNo Art District continues to grow and prosper, which means this year’s seventh annual RiNo Art Safari promises more stops and diversions than ever before. The event, which began as a series of art-studio open houses, has grown to include dozens of galleries and creative spaces, as well…

Dog Day

It’s been fourteen dog years since the last Lucky Mutt Strut, but the 5K fun run and walk, which benefits the MaxFund No-Kill Animal Shelter and Adoption Center, will return today after having skipped 2012. The 25-year-old MaxFund gives cats and dogs a “second leash” on life, placing more than…

Building Blocks

What could a fresh coat of paint, live music and a comfortable place to enjoy a meal outdoors do for a block in your neighborhood? The second annual Better Block project — this year focusing generally on Five Points, and specifically on 24th Street between California and Welton — aims…

Life’s Shining Armor

“I’m not gonna lie about it,” Buntport Theater’s Brian Colonna says of his autobiographical play, A Knight to Remember: My Quest to Gallantly Recapture the Past. “I’ll just come out and say the conceit is that the other members of Buntport thought it was a bad idea, so they wouldn’t…

Mother Knows Best

A recent Facebook thread carried a passionate argument about whether childbirth was ecstatic or hideously painful. “Painful” voters found the ecstatic folk smug; the ecstatics hinted that the painful contingent were insufficiently maternal. Apparently Motherhood Out Loud, an evening of linked monologues on the theme of motherhood, comes down on…

Leafing Out

You might never have given a second thought to the culture of trees growing on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, but veteran groundsman Alan Nelson, who’s been caring for them for years, thinks they’re more than just trees. That’s why every spring and fall, he takes a break…

On the Vanguard

When Baltimore burlesque artist Paco Fish quit his day job to pursue performing, it resulted in serious financial repercussions: His home went into foreclosure. But Fish saw it as an opportunity, loading his entire life into a van and embarking on a 52-week burlesque tour of the U.S. and Canada…

Flick Pick: Something in the Air

Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous, freewheeling, semi-autobiographical Something in the Air is an ode to both youth’s universal qualities and the specifics of Assayas’s youth in particular. The picture opens in the suburbs just outside Paris in 1971, among a group of teenage students still energized by the explosive student and worker…