Boulder Outdoor Cinema may have temporarily moved indoors, but that doesn’t mean the unsympathetic winter chill is keeping audiences from enjoying some heart-warming cinema. After a killer lineup of holiday films like Elf, A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, this free-of-charge series will round out its holiday theme…
Live music and film are strange bedfellows in the modern age, but it wasn’t always so. In the silent era, a live accompaniment was standard practice for all films. Local musician and filmmaker Paul Buscarello is resurrecting that long-gone experience with a performance of his new, original score for the…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
In the twenty years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch-comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funnymen, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one who would…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name of Nelson Mandela is already shorthand for the things Mandela director Justin Chadwick shows…
When Peter Guralnick released Last Train to Memphis, the first half of his superb two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, some people must have wondered, “Who needs two books to tell the story of Elvis?” They may as well have grumbled, “Two whole books about America?” Some lives, some careers, push…
When he was thirteen, Marilyn Manson — then just Christian schoolkid Brian Warner of Canton, Ohio — would hide out in the basement while his grandfather masturbated to bestiality porn. Then he’d go upstairs and cheer himself up reading Mad magazine. The self-dubbed God of Fuck is famous for his…
All photos courtesy of Sony PicturesAmerican Hustle, directed and co-written by David O. Russell, is undeniably the must-watch film this holiday season. With outstanding performances by an A-list cast (Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), the period film is loosely based on the real-life Abscam FBI Sting…
Joaquin Phoenix in Her.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics talk about Spike Jonze’s Her and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, in addition to the wave of films all coming out before the year’s over. Listen to it on iTunes or below on Soundcloud:…
The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They’re not necessarily dishonest; they just can’t resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell’s extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what…
The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Their very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully’s challenge: “Go ahead — make me laugh.” Which is why there’s danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the…
Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. The Llewyn Davis of the title, played by Oscar Isaac,…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a ten-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting twelve months of movie-going into some sort of perspective…
I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin. The Act of Killing ― The year’s best…
In 2013, there were a thousand bright lights and no strong center ― even with Gravity, which ranked No. 8 on our tally of nearly 100 critics’ bests. results in this year’s Village VoiceFilm Poll, like the decisions arrived at by critics’ circles around the country, suggest that consensus is…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here are ten films you won’t want to miss in 2014. 1. Adieu au Language (directed by Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Luc Godard, former master of the French…
In Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi romance, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a divorcé who rebounds by falling in love with his smartphone. On a recent Wednesday, however, he’s a delinquent boyfriend, leaving his iPad abandoned on a chair in a Lebanese restaurant as he bounces off to the parking lot for…
For professional film critics, you’ll notice, the year in film tends to conclude prematurely. Those “Best Of” lists you see popping up everywhere around now have often been tallied, decided and finalized by mid-November — and in the web’s ever-harried race for clicks and page views, that date seems to…
The Stop the Presses series at the Alamo Drafthouse, which celebrates the media in movies with screenings of such classics as Sweet Smell of Success and concludes with the premiere of Anchorman 2, has inspired a lot of conversation about the relationship between journalists and the movies that portray them. While inspirational tales of dedicated investigators may go on to win awards and persuade young idealists to pursue a career in the news, movies about journalists who suck at their jobs are often much more entertaining. The worst newsmen in cinema are united by their blinkered narcissism, which bleeds into their work life in fascinating ways. Read on for a list of movies that herald wildly unprofessional behavior, and stay classy, Denver.
Tucked away in the wealth of holiday programming at the Alamo Drafthouse this week are two linked films with very different takes on the season. One, A Christmas Story, is an almost universally beloved seasonal classic, filled with nostalgia, warm fuzzies and just enough edge to keep it from getting…
