He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
Outside in 303.This summer feature at the Museo de las Amesricas is absolutely spectacular, with each of the included artists being given lots of space to stretch out. Conceived and organized by Museo director Maruca Salazar with help from the Denver Art Museum’s Gwen Chanzit, the show looks at a…
Beware the movie that’s Fun with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist — a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of…
In Tate Taylor’s subtly extraordinary James Brown biopic Get On Up, Chadwick Boseman plays the man who, seemingly just by willing it to be so, became the Godfather of Soul. Get On Up isn’t a perfect picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don’t quite pay off. But…
Land Ho! is essentially How Grandpa Got His Groove Back, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s grandchildren but just old…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
It takes grit to make a movie in Colorado — sometimes True Grit. This state’s film industry has gotten mixed reviews over the years, but there’s no question that producer Hal Wallis created a classic when he made True Grit, based on the book by Charles Portis, in Colorado in…
Code Black — which opens Friday, August 1, at the Sie FilmCenter — reminds viewers of an astonishing reality of the health-care industry: In emergencies, seconds count. The documentary follows Ryan McGarry, a physician who trained in the trauma bay at Los Angeles County Hospital and brought cameras along for…
Too hot to hike? Escaping into a movie theater to glut on popcorn and blockbuster films is one of the tried and true ways to beat the blazing summer sun. Sure, these $200 million Hollywood titans sometimes crash — but even if they let you down, you can bank on…
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall continues to defy legal threats and issue same-sex marriage licenses — just as Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Clela Rorex did four decades ago. In his documentary Limited Partnership, the closing night film at this year’s Cinema Q film festival, filmmaker Tom Miller…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. [Subscribe to the Voice Film Club…
With the booming Denver housing market and the influx of hipsters struggling to find meaning in a culture built on a bedrock of irony and flippant fashion, visiting Brooklyn — ground zero for vacuous aesthetes — is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future Queen City of…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past nine. No other movie I can think of captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting better than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, occasionally frustrated, and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is a…
Suppose you’re in high school, and your interest in movies has begun to run deeper than multiplex fare. You may find yourself gravitating to a particular kind of intellectual film: the dour, the twisty and the ostentatious must be regarded as the pinnacle of the form, because, you feel, you…
Articulated Perspectives.Summer is group-show time, and Bill Havu and Nick Ryan have put together a great exhibit that looks at artists who combine representational imagery with abstract sensibilities. The exhibit, installed on both the main level and the mezzanine, includes the work of three painters and one sculptor. As you…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on screen talked like people off it, and they spent as much time looking at phones and laptops as you do, and if their moments…
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and directed by Brett “Rush Hour Trilogy” Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We’re not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it’s far less aggressively stupid than, say,…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cinema is becoming the new norm, according to Denver Film Society programmer Matthew Campbell: Festivals such as Sundance now feature films about LGBT characters who are fully fleshed out and whose stories have less to do with their sexual identity, he points out. Marriage and…
With Broadway now the center of the hipster universe, it’s hard to remember that time thirty years ago when Denver’s once gleaming “Miracle Mile” — a stretch of streamlined stores and car dealerships — had devolved into a malevolent mile of boarded-up storefronts, decrepit hotels and vacant lots. The area…
