Last summer, the fate of the 88 Drive-In — one of the last drive-ins left in the state — looked uncertain. The small operation in Commerce City was trying to make the expensive and inevitable transition to digital projection, as 35mm film was becoming extinct. On top of that, owner…
Unfriended On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the…
I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. “You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up, and started churning out indie movies justifying why.” In the ’40s, men fought wars at eighteen. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock faced accusations…
It might seem hard to believe in these days of Furious 7, but cinema did not start with an ear-splitting, seat-shaking bang. For decades, filmmakers had to rely on crafting stories that entranced and enthralled audiences without making a sound. And Howie Movshovitz, director of the Denver Silent Film Festival,…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies that God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon and screams…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy in which all of the…
In Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, the Zellner Brothers — David and Nathan — offer a haunting meditation on the relationship between truth and fiction, and between desire and belief. Based on an urban legend about a Japanese woman who died looking for the cash hidden at the end of the…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in…
Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
As a character, Games of Thrones stable boy (and friend of Bran Stark) Hodor doesn’t have much to say, except for his own name. Turns out it’s not even his real name, though everyone thinks it is. But in real life, hulking Kristian Nairn, the actor who plays him, does…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly. [Subscribe to the Voice…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys Targaryan was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’s most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there’s two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance in the film version of The Longest Ride, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience…
When you’re young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There’s no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the…
In 2012, in an act of civil disobedience, dozens of urban farmers gathered and took over a piece of land called the Gill Tract, an area once dedicated to agricultural studies and owned by the University of California, Berkeley. Occupy the Farm, which screens Tuesday, April 7 at the Sie…
How big a Game of Thrones fan are you? Some of the city’s most dedicated GoT watchers gathered Tuesday night at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for a first look at the highly touted bloodbath that will be Season Five, which officially premieres on HBO on April 12. Photographer Danielle…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
Clueless rich guy Tom Perkins rightly became the laughingstock of the Internet last year after comparing America’s “war on one-percenters” to the Nazi Kristallnacht. However detestably fatuous Perkins is in real life, it must be admitted that he’d make a fascinating fictional character, perhaps in a Greek tragedy about a…
