The engrossing Spinning Plates is an ode to the restaurant business

There’s little to suggest the restaurant industry needs a champion, but director Joseph Levy took on that mantle anyway. His feature debut is the splendid and engrossing documentary Spinning Plates, a love letter to that singular intersection of artistic innovation, cultural legacy, community pride, and family-sustaining (or -straining) commerce known…

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Barbara Carpenter and Janice McDonald. In the east gallery at Spark, Barbara Carpenter has assembled a large group of small photos hung in clusters, salon-style, for Walking Miss Daisy: Photographs by Barbara Carpenter. The Miss Daisy of the title is Carpenter’s dog, and all of the photos have been taken…

Michel Gondry Picks Noam Chomsky’s Brain

Michel Gondry likes video stores. He is, after all, the director of the ultimate VHS sonnet, Be Kind Rewind, in which Jack Black and Mos Def re-create classics like Ghostbusters from plastic bags and tinsel. (Sad about the death of Blockbuster? Give it a watch.) One night, Gondry was browsing…

A geek’s guide to the Starz Denver Film Festival

Do you like movies? Of course you do. What geek doesn’t? The good news is that for the next ten days the Starz Denver Film Fest, one of Denver’s premiere cultural events, is going to be bringing a lot of movies to town for you to watch. The less good…

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Barbara Carpenter and Janice McDonald. In the east gallery at Spark, Barbara Carpenter has assembled a large group of small photos hung in clusters, salon-style, for Walking Miss Daisy: Photographs by Barbara Carpenter. The Miss Daisy of the title is Carpenter’s dog, and all of the photos have been taken…

Thor: The Dark World keeps the Marvel machine going

Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying titan with…

Matthew McConaughey gets physical in Dallas Buyers Club

Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained sixty pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds — he looked like a walking,…

Can Aereo become the next player in the broadcast business?

It was a sad day when television switched from analog to digital. People had to go out and buy antennas and converter boxes just to watch basic television that had been free forever. Those antennas were never quite reliable, though, and while cable was more consistent, it was also more…

Podcast: Thor‘s a bore, About Time, and The Right Stuff turns 30

Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2012 MVLFFLLC. TM &2012 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.Thor: The Dark World just doesn’t compare to the 2011 original, in spite of its few redeeming qualities. That’s the consensus among this paper’s film critics on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, available now. Listen to…

Five under-the-radar picks for the Starz Denver Film Festival

It’s that time again — the Starz Denver Film Fest is here, bringing joy for the cinephile girls and boys. With almost 200 films in every genre, from all over the world, there’s a lot to take in. To help navigate the schedule, we asked festival programmer Matt Campbell to…