Five picks from the Women + Film Voices Film Festival

As with past editions, this year’s third annual Women + Film Voices Film Festival aligns with the celebration of International Women’s Day — which is Friday, March 8. Curated by festival producer Tammy Brislin, FilmCenter artistic director Brit Withey and festival director Britta Erickson, narratives and documentaries alike get top…

Now Showing

20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…

Let My People Go!‘s cute comedy offers little insight

With his fluttery falsetto and haughty gaze, Ruben, the flamboyantly gay, ambivalently Jewish twenty-something hero of the new French comedy Let My People Go!, is the kind of big-screen character usually relegated to the sidelines. It’s refreshing to see him front and center, gamely played by Nicolas Maury, gangly limbs…

The reimagined Jack the Giant Slayer is a tale well told

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on “Jack and the Beanstalk” be if those fearsome beasties didn’t somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook…

West of Memphis is more a work of advocacy than of journalism

The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. But for many viewers, that isn’t the case in the four films chronicling the arrest, conviction, and eighteen-year incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin for a crime they didn’t commit. The crime-scene photos of three young…

Californication‘s excesses take a turn for the worse

Honestly, when it started six years ago, Californication was provocative, ballsy and fun, with laugh-out-loud dialogue and plenty of smart musings about love, sex, family and responsibility. Over five seasons, anti-hero Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has drank and fucked his way through a series of Hollywood writing jobs, all the…

21 & Over just dares you to get offended

Guy humor is always with us, kind of like the poor. For as long as cavemen have been etching fart jokes into the walls of caves, women have been rolling their eyes, as they didn’t yet have the language tools to whip up outraged essays for Jezebel. Still, given the…

Now Showing

20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…

It would take a miniseries to do justice to Bless Me, Ultima

Why is there evil in the world?” That question and its corollaries — Where does evil come from? Why can so many create and commit it with apparent immunity? — are at the core of the film Bless Me, Ultima, whose seven-year-old hero, Antonio, wrestles with riddles that have likely…

Everyone on New Girl needs therapy…but that’s why we love them

Depending on your perspective, Zooey Deschanel is either the cutest, funniest, most adorable little retro-kookster on earth, or she’s an irritating try-hard with zero comedy chops. The only thing the world seems able to universally agree on is that Deschanel has nice bangs. As such, her sitcom — New Girl,…

Weird love: The ten strangest onscreen couples

Love is weird. Most anyone over the age of, say, sixteen or so has at least one story of an ill-fated romance based on the old adage of “opposites attract.” Worse, it’s usually more “whatever will cause us the most confusion, chaos and, most likely, pain attracts.” That’s not to…

Now Showing

20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…

The magical Beautiful Creatures is under the spell of abstinence

Here’s a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is top-to-bottom depraved: “Then why are our high-school witches, vampires and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That glitter-pored Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing…

In 56 Up, decades of dreams are shattered by reality

Life goes inexorably, chillingly, on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all of these pitiable souls, subjected…

Does anyone still care about John McClane?

Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking if you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action — and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live…

Abbas Kiarostami’s films are still singular and provocative

Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…