The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June’s Trollhunter, Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it’s neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy. Set in a sprawling London public-housing compound, the film follows a group of teenage…
In Jesse Peretz’s Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, a kind of upstate New York version of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski — a man out of time, blinkered enough to be living the hippie dream. In the film’s first scene, Ned is “entrapped” into selling pot at a farmers’…
Inspired by a 2008 New York Times Magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, Steve James’s commanding documentary The Interrupters, about “violence interrupters” in Chicago, who intervene in conflicts before they escalate into gunshots, unfolds as deeply reported journalism. Much like Hoop Dreams (1994), James’s in-depth examination of the athletic aspirations of…
Don’t talk shit to Steve Carell, because apparently he will slap you like a bitch. Not in a scary, Wayne-Brady-turned-evil kind of way — no, Steve Carell is way too nice for that, and also, in a weird way, he’s even scarier. Because somehow, Steve Carell is a sweet enough…
Another Victory Over the Sun. For this group show, all of the exterior light sources at MCA Denver have been covered over so that the interior is essentially dark. Organized by director Adam Lerner and assistant curator Nora Burnett Abrams, Another Victory is made up of art that’s meant to…
The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a fifty-something policeman in West Ireland, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager; he also displays a…
Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls and based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…
A cinematic reboot for the patron saint of 98-pound weaklings, Conan the Barbarian is both truer to the vision of its character’s creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than John Milius’s 1982 movie incarnation. Director Marcus Nispel, along with no fewer than three screenwriters, eschews the lugubrious mythmaking…
This summer, dozens of grown adults spent hours upon hours of valuable time playing with LEGOs toward the goal of winning mild fame and glory in Build-A-Brickbuster Pixelfest, an international film festival and contest celebrating the art of making stop-motion animation with tiny toys, held over the weekend of August…
In the small (literally) but fascinating world of people who make art using GI Joes, Gio Toninelo is pretty much a god. The founder and curator of GI Joe Fest, an international GI Joe-centric stop-motion film festival that branched out of Denver last year to locations as far-flung as Slovakia…
Gather round, children, and I will tell you of a time — it was, like, at least 50 years ago — when there was racism. Those days are over, of course, and in the bright future of today all humans live in perfect harmony with no economic or institutional discrepancy…
After all the strife and human sacrifice during the civil rights movement, it was pretty awesome in the end when every black person was triumphant in some way and every villain got her hilariously cathartic comeuppance by eating a pie full of feces — but let’s not forget that it…
Among the most instantly recognizable and enduringly popular scenes from the James Bond movie franchise are the elaborate death traps put into place for the protagonist by a seemingly endless array of antiheroes. The sadistic and convoluted plot devices create dramatic tension, or at least amuse audiences, and invariably result…
Tomorrow evening brings the final entry in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Sci-Fi Film Series at the Phipps Theater, with Gattaca closing the sequence out with a biological bang. As we have been doing lately, we caught up with the DMNS’ Curator and Department Chair of Health Sciences…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
Money-back guarantees feel like such a remnant of the old economy. Does the depressed consumer class even expect companies to make good on their advertised word anymore? But perhaps the dream of free slices scammed from over-promising pizza parlors springs eternal. At least that’s the game being run on Jesse…
More than just the Hollywood It Girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting Big Scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account, thoroughly post-empire — she doesn’t need…
The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat’s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses. The Sleeping Beauty, like last year’s Bluebeard, is based on a classic Charles Perrault legend. But Breillat reimagines the slumbering heroine as a gender insurrectionist, freeing her from her…
Attack the Block — the Joe Cornish flick bought to you by Edgar Wright, geek god director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — is an absurdly great movie. It’s the kind of work that inspires kids to become filmmakers, because it’s so…
Fairplay, Colorado, is a tiny mountain town with about one street, situated some 40 miles south of Frisco between the San Isabel and Pike national forests. In other words, it’s in the middle of nowhere. In other other words, it’s a really difficult place to shoot a feature film. “Yeah,…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns that her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel that Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as…
