You will never really get movies unless you do them the old-fashioned way: No matter how pervasive digital media becomes, movies thrive in the dark, up on the big screen, in front of engaged viewers. CU-Boulder’s International Film Series knows this, and is celebrating its 75th year of operation with…
February is here, which means a societally obligated focus on all things love for the next two weeks! Don’t worry, though — apart from a couple of carefully curated selections, this month’s list of geek events will barely register the existence of Valentine’s Day. Instead, our focus — as always…
The queasiest thing about American Crime Story’s (FX) retelling of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial is how easily such a flagrant miscarriage of justice could happen all over again. The twin forces that most warped that case, after all, still plague us today: a tabloid culture that reduces flesh-and-blood…
Is the Stanley Hotel giving up the ghost on its film festival? For the past three years, the haunted landmark raised cinematic spirits with the Stanley Film Festival. But the traditional April fest has been put on hold for 2016, and Stanley owner John Cullen has parted ways with the Denver Film…
Get ready, drag enthusiasts: Tickets go on sale today for the Denver stop of RuPaul’s Drag Race Battle of the Seasons, at the Ogden Theater on May 1. This year’s 2016 Extravaganza Tour is headed to our town for the first time — last year’s events here starring Drag Race…
Mulder and Scully are back, at least for the length of a mini-series, and legions of costumed X-Files fans re-emerged from the shadows to cheer on their long-lost heroes at a big-screen premiere party at the Oriental Theater. The Enigma was there, too — tattoos, horns and all — just to…
“Every film is a documentary of its actors,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, Andrew Haigh’s shattering marital drama 45 Years expands that maxim: As we gaze at and listen to these performers, whose characters reflect on nearly a half-century together — almost as long as…
The movie they’re selling isn’t the movie this is. Sony Pictures Classics is peddling Nicholas Hytner’s film of Alan Bennett’s play and memoir The Lady in the Van like it’s the usual twinkly Best Exotic time-with-our-elders holiday entertainment. There’s Maggie Smith, dressed up as what my grandmother used to call…
Popcorn is a truly rare gem in a vast, picked-over field of rocks: a fun, smart slasher film that was released during a time when we all thought we’d never scream at a slasher again. Well, break out the earplugs: Popcorn is showing Wednesday, January 27, at the Alamo Drafthouse. For…
Here’s an odd thing to say of a lavishly expensive 3D IMAX maritime disaster flick that hits theaters just a month after the last one: They don’t make them like this anymore. There’s a reason for that, of course — the parents and grandparents who like ’em stolid and corny…
But what about the meaninglessness of everything? William Monahan’s Mojave is one of those ’90s-style chatty-killer movies, mixed with one of those ’90s-style guns-in-the-desert existential cheapies, the kind of picture where good-looking dudes shooting each other is passed off as elemental and beautiful rather than just what it actually is…
There’s essentially one joke in the Kung-Fu Panda movies. A ridiculous, adorable creature executes some extravagant action-flick flourish — vaulting over roofs, dropping a bad guy, striking a poster-perfect superhero pose. Then the battle music fades and that adorable creature breaks badass character to remind us it’s totally relatable, even…
There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless…
Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
“Who can give me the derivative of X?” a high-school teacher asks early in the YA-apocalypse mashup The 5th Wave. As soon as she asks that, the lights blink off, everybody’s cellphones die and jets tumble from the sky. We never hear a student respond, but here’s my Official Fan…
In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously left the White House with a warning to the American public about the rise of the military-industrial complex. When Barack Obama exits the Oval Office next year, he wouldn’t be remiss in cautioning the nation about the conspiracy-industrial complex, which has dug its tentacles into…
What are the limits of representation? That’s a moral question that hovers over any depiction of the Final Solution, and it’s not considered lightly by László Nemes’ Son of Saul, which turns unimaginable horrors into tangible ones. By venturing inside the death factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nemes risks greeting obscenity with…
Benghazi is a hashtag battle-cry, a call to arms that many Americans don’t understand. Unlike the simplicity of “Remember the Alamo!” a bleat of “Benghazi!” still has people wondering, “Wait, what happened? And why are we mad?” Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation, though…
Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top…
‘Tis awards season again and the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has spoken from the mountain top and revealed who they deem worthy of potentially taking home the Oscar, their naked little bald statuette that seems to mean so much to so many in the film industry. Did…
Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. To Americans of a certain generation, he’ll always be Hans Gruber from Die Hard; to those of a slightly fresher vintage, he’ll never not be Severus Snape. But it was his ability to transcend the typecasting of those iconic roles that…
How do we remember our heroes? Colorado was one of the first states to celebrate MLK Day, and on January 18, the annual Marade honoring Martin Luther King Jr. will kick off in City Park. But there are now more Americans born after the death of Martin Luther King Jr…
