Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie-flick classic, has long been the subject of intense critical analysis laying bare its rich social and political commentary. Romero not only set in motion the zombie fetish that thrives globally today, but he created a film that simultaneously captured the…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
Think Little Miss Sunshine could have used an elastic penis? Behold: Bad Grandpa, in which a widower and an eight-year-old drive across the country hitting on chicks, farting in diners, and getting granddad’s manhood stuck in a vending machine before sending the boy out in drag to perform a striptease…
“Imagine if marriage didn’t exist, and you’re a guy and you ask someone to get married,” proposes comedian Aziz Ansari in his new Netflix standup special, Buried Alive, which premieres November 1. “Hey, so we’ve been hanging out all the time, spending a lot of time together. I want to…
The zombification of America got its start in 1968, when George A. Romero and a bunch of his friends and colleagues released Night of the Living Dead, the scrappy little horror movie that could not only serve as patient zero in the ongoing pop-cultural zombie apocalypse, it also revolutionized horror…
Farm implements, interesting taxidermy — and a zebra-skin rug. Those are the only clues that Mark Meyer, one of the stars of the Travel Channel show Baggage Battles, would give out in advance when describing an episode of the reality show — which airs tonight — taking place at the…
While Colorado has more than its fair share of mountain-centric film festivals, Telluride Mountainfilm stands out for its diversity. Some of the biggest awards at this year’s edition of the 34-year-old conclave went to films with little to no connection to the mountains, including best cinematography winner Dirty Wars, which…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor, Dickensian beanpole and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear that Cumberbatch would be…
We see Bono’s face before we hear a soul singer sing, but other than that prizing of current fame over timeless R&B, Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the northern Alabama studio, whose musicians and engineers laid down some of the greatest…
Adam Milner. The show Adam Milner: Wave so I know you’re real represents Emmanuel Gallery director Shannon Corrigan’s latest effort in a series dedicated to what used to be called cutting-edge art by artists who work in Colorado. And as this exhibit proves, it’s a successful formula. The impact as…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme-park…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…
Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…
In this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss Captain Phillips and Machete Kills, both out on Friday, October 11…
Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder fifteen years ago in Laramie, Wyoming, has become a major symbol of the struggle for civil rights for the LGBTQ community around the globe. Now, thanks to the diligent work of Shepard friend and filmmaker Michele Josue, the world gets to see so much more of…
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’s true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…
The most successfully realized element in writer-director Randy Moore’s would-be cult film Escape From Tomorrow, which has all the raw ingredients for a David Lynch-style phantasm, is that it was surreptitiously filmed in Disney World and Disneyland. While on vacation at Epcot Center with his wife and two young children,…
During his 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Herman Cain rhapsodized about the fence he’d build on the U.S.-Mexico border: twenty feet tall, with barbed wire, electricity and a moat. “And I would put those alligators in that moat!” he cheered. For Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez built that fence but left…
Denver has been waiting for a local power couple to watch on television (and we’re not counting Lala and Melo) and now we have one to obsess over — a ridiculously good looking one (see our post on the Latest Word). Last Sunday marked the highly anticipated debut of Eric…
Veteran character actor Ken Foree has deep roots in Denver. He graduated from a small Catholic high school here, where he was an all-city, all-state basketball player for two years — “arguably the best player in the state of Colorado,” he says — and his appearance at this year’s Mile…
