The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth. In his first original screenplay written directly for the screen, novelist Cormac McCarthy takes a holiday from the apocalyptic portentousness of his No Country for Old Men and…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore on screen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges.Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers Club (opening in Denver next week), playing AIDS victim,…
The entertainment industry, with its long-established allergy to new ideas, often mines the bestseller list for source material. Studios are more likely greenlight a scary story after it has been officially vetted by the reading public, and less likely to interfere with a proven earner. In horror cinema, however, the filmmaker’s vision of a story so often becomes definitive in the minds of viewers that it overshadows the books that inspired that vision in the first place. With that in mind, the Westword Book Club has compiled a list of 6 cult classic horror that were inspired by novels and short stories, deliberately avoiding canonical works like Dracula and Frankenstein as well as blockbusters like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby in favor of slightly obscure titles that deserve more eyeballs. Then we Lars von Trier’ed ourselves into a corner by only selecting movies that are available to stream instantly, so you’ll have time to check these out before the Halloween spirit is buried beneath the snows of November. Enjoy your nightmares.
Where you find zombies, you will also find gore. Sure, there are zombie films that aren’t particularly bloody, but they are the exception, not the rule. This is, after all, a genre where disembowelments are standard operating procedure. To stand out in this viscera-clotted field, a movie’s got to be…
This past weekend was just a warm up for the real Halloween celebrations, and the Denver Film Society has a solid line-up of seasonal entertainment planned for the Sie FilmCenter. Don’t worry — none of these events will require you to be dressed as slutty Abraham Lincoln or to do…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Kimberly Peirce’s reimagining of Stephen King’s Carrie — and Nicholson convinces Stephanie to go see Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa…
Al Karim, Zimmer, Al Karim, Friberg. Robischon Gallery is so large that it can easily handle four (or, in a pinch, five) substantial solos. Typically, there’s some unifying element that links them all together, and that’s true this time, as all of the artists involved use photo-based methods ranging from…
Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie-flick classic, has long been the subject of intense critical analysis laying bare its rich social and political commentary. Romero not only set in motion the zombie fetish that thrives globally today, but he created a film that simultaneously captured the…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
Think Little Miss Sunshine could have used an elastic penis? Behold: Bad Grandpa, in which a widower and an eight-year-old drive across the country hitting on chicks, farting in diners, and getting granddad’s manhood stuck in a vending machine before sending the boy out in drag to perform a striptease…
“Imagine if marriage didn’t exist, and you’re a guy and you ask someone to get married,” proposes comedian Aziz Ansari in his new Netflix standup special, Buried Alive, which premieres November 1. “Hey, so we’ve been hanging out all the time, spending a lot of time together. I want to…
The zombification of America got its start in 1968, when George A. Romero and a bunch of his friends and colleagues released Night of the Living Dead, the scrappy little horror movie that could not only serve as patient zero in the ongoing pop-cultural zombie apocalypse, it also revolutionized horror…
Farm implements, interesting taxidermy — and a zebra-skin rug. Those are the only clues that Mark Meyer, one of the stars of the Travel Channel show Baggage Battles, would give out in advance when describing an episode of the reality show — which airs tonight — taking place at the…
While Colorado has more than its fair share of mountain-centric film festivals, Telluride Mountainfilm stands out for its diversity. Some of the biggest awards at this year’s edition of the 34-year-old conclave went to films with little to no connection to the mountains, including best cinematography winner Dirty Wars, which…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor, Dickensian beanpole and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear that Cumberbatch would be…
We see Bono’s face before we hear a soul singer sing, but other than that prizing of current fame over timeless R&B, Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the northern Alabama studio, whose musicians and engineers laid down some of the greatest…
Adam Milner. The show Adam Milner: Wave so I know you’re real represents Emmanuel Gallery director Shannon Corrigan’s latest effort in a series dedicated to what used to be called cutting-edge art by artists who work in Colorado. And as this exhibit proves, it’s a successful formula. The impact as…
