Today, it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America, the triumph of rhythm over melody — the whirligig boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as the ice cream…
On April 26, filmmakers across the city are invited to take part in One Day in Denver. Novice camera-phone auteurs and skilled movie-makers alike will be capturing their unique perspectives on Denver and then submitting the footage to the multi-faceted documentary project. The project is a spin-off of One Day…
As editor of Found Magazine and a contributor to This American Life, Davy Rothbart has devoted himself to mining humor and pathos from the lives of strangers. When he learned about the Medora Hornets, a high school basketball team suffering through a nasty losing streak in a factory-gutted Heartland community,…
Now that HBO’s magnificent Game of Thrones is back, Sunday nights just became appointment viewing again. That’s great news unless your free HBO just expired, or your ex-roommate finally changed his HBO Go password or you’re not sure you can stand watching alone knowing that the show is probably just…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’s ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…
As its subtitle suggests, one reason that Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor. “I don’t do quagmires,” Donald Rumsfeld said in a…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Known to hip-hop heads and vinyl connoisseurs as Peanut Butter Wolf, Chris Manak is a DJ and producer who founded the influential underground label Stones Throw Records. The new documentary Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton tells the story of this nearly two-decade-old Los Angeles record label by exploring Wolf’s personal…
From HAL to the Terminator, robots in fiction play the part of the bad guy more often than not. Here in the real world, though, robots do some good work, and very little evil. You can get a taste of some of that good work this Sunday, April 13 at…
Jane Wells has devoted a decade to documenting human rights abuses throughout the world. She served as producer on The Devil Came on Horseback, a chronicle of the genocide in Darfur, and most recently directed the feature documentary Tricked, about sex trafficking in the United States. While working on the…
Several years ago, when Adán De La Garza and Christina Battle moved to Denver from cities with vibrant media arts communities, they sought out the same thing here. They did not find it. As video artists, they craved an artistic network, a local scene where they could bounce off ideas…
The Stanley Film Festival, presented by the Denver Film Society, has announced the complete lineup for the festival, which runs from April 24 through April 27 in Estes Park and includes screenings of such movies as Eyes Wide Shut and Gremlins and more. In keeping with its setting in the…
Some cult films have such an expansive audience, they may as well be mainstream. Others attract a smaller, more dedicated cult of followers who share the movie’s joys via word of mouth and keep it alive at midnight screenings. Then there are other films that seem to have no cult…
Whether you are interested in cultural documentaries, classic dramas or anti-colonial revenge films, this year’s XicanIndie Film Festival promises to showcase the most innovative and intriguing Latino, Chicano and global indigenous films. Here are five must-see selections from the festival, which starts tonight; head to Su Teatro to see the…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — aka Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the last six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai food. If only he’d added ’70s conspiracy thrillers…
Our story resumes: Having found a love-like feeling for Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), “restful domestic comfort” has, at the outset of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II, robbed the young Joe (Stacy Martin) of her orgasm. Naomi Wolf documented a similar problem in her 2012 book Vagina; the similarities between Joe…
The great insight in director Roger Michell’s fourth collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi is its vision of Paris as an arena equally amenable to romantic comedy and sulking tragedy. Thus the City of Lights becomes a proving ground in Le Week-End, in which Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play an…
Why can’t women stay friends? That’s a trick question, of course, but also one that British actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells — lifelong pals in real life — attempt to answer earnestly and honestly in their new HBO cringe comedy Doll & Em. In the six-episode series, Mortimer and…
“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day.”I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers; murderers swearing their innocence; a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped that…
In his tenth year as curator of the XicanIndie Film Festival, Daniel Salazar decided to revamp the whole project. Working with film programmers from all over the Americas, Salazar created the Encuentro Mundial de Cine, an international curatorial collaboration using digital platforms to broaden the pool of films available to…
