HTML On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast: The Vacation reboot disappoints, as does Adam Sandler’s Pixels (but it can’t be near as bad as critics are describing, says the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl). Meanwhile, the ’40s noir melodrama Phoenix might be one of the year’s best, says Voice film critic…
In the world of LEGO, everything truly is awesome. Love for the decades-old building blocks has never been bigger, and the company makes sets for dozens of popular movies, which sell like hotcakes year-round. LEGO bricks even got their own big-screen adventure last year with the aptly titled The LEGO Movie…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that’s already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” admits Abe. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director, who…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
When asked if either the digital revolution in film or the demise of old-school media had affected his career, film critic Howie Movshovitz answers succinctly: “No.” For decades, the award-winning writer, broadcaster, curator, educator and filmmaker has exposed the world of film to several generations in the region. And today…
The heat is getting unbearable (finally) – all the more reason to go inside and have some good, geeky fun. August is full of great options to beat the heat while celebrating the geek, from fantasy legends visiting Denver to a whirlwind of sharks. Here are the month’s ten best…
How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A LEGO Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: LEGO construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like the Country Squire from hell and sought the family-bonding experience by driving cross-country to a mythical mega-amusement park known as Walley World. If…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man. Sandler films have predictable scripts: In two hours or less, he’ll transform from…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” declared Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played by…
This is a great time to be gay in America — and if you’re not, it’s an even greater time to sit back and learn about your queer friends and neighbors. Film is the great equalizer, and tomorrow through Sunday, the Denver Film Society’s annual Cinema Q Film Festival at…
We run down the ten best movies of 2015 (so far) on this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club. Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, joined by Amy Nicholson at LA Weekly, each share a few of their favorites on this mid-year (well for Hollywood, anyway)…
The pizza joint Shakey’s in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the pair…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, respectively) catch up at a doughnut joint…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on, too — but…
Silents never actually were. According to composer Rodney Sauer, musical accompanists always played for silent film screenings, a feat that will be replicated by his Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra this week when it underscores the innovative 1930 German film People on Sunday as part of Boulder’s Chautauqua Silent Film…
If science fiction and economic trends can agree on anything, it’s that robots are destined to become our merciless overlords. You can prepare yourself for this horrific inevitability, or even study how you might fight it, with a trip to the Longmont Museum for its new robocentric film series, launching…
Long gone are the days when depictions of reporters in movies were reduced to a fedora with a white “Press” card tucked into the bow. We have Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men and Peter Finch’s epic cry of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
While Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer’s new movie Trainwreck is “occasionally very funny, it also feels carefully constructed to make its points, chief among them that men can get away with all kinds of bad or crazy behavior that women can’t,” writes Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her review…
Does gay have a particular sound? Is there a certain way that gay men speak that our brains read as a dead giveaway to their sexual orientation? The new film Do I Sound Gay?, opening Friday at the Mayan Theatre, explores the myth and science behind the queer dialect ,…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here’s 100 or so minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. Besides that, Mr. Holmes…
