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…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme-park…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
I’m pretty sure the dumbest way to die is killing yourself upon discovering that faking your own death has tricked your forbidden lover into his or her own suicide. The second might be to get gutted in one of the jumbled, perfunctory sword fights that clang up the streets of…
Perhaps the best and worst thing about young teenagers is that they’re capable of what George W. Bush fans used to call “great moral clarity.” In HBO’s sure-to-make-you-bawl documentary Valentine Road, Aliyah, a student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, breaks down the differences between gayness and…
In this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss Captain Phillips and Machete Kills, both out on Friday, October 11…
Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder fifteen years ago in Laramie, Wyoming, has become a major symbol of the struggle for civil rights for the LGBTQ community around the globe. Now, thanks to the diligent work of Shepard friend and filmmaker Michele Josue, the world gets to see so much more of…
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’s true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…
The most successfully realized element in writer-director Randy Moore’s would-be cult film Escape From Tomorrow, which has all the raw ingredients for a David Lynch-style phantasm, is that it was surreptitiously filmed in Disney World and Disneyland. While on vacation at Epcot Center with his wife and two young children,…
During his 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Herman Cain rhapsodized about the fence he’d build on the U.S.-Mexico border: twenty feet tall, with barbed wire, electricity and a moat. “And I would put those alligators in that moat!” he cheered. For Machete Kills, Robert Rodriguez built that fence but left…
Denver has been waiting for a local power couple to watch on television (and we’re not counting Lala and Melo) and now we have one to obsess over — a ridiculously good looking one (see our post on the Latest Word). Last Sunday marked the highly anticipated debut of Eric…
Veteran character actor Ken Foree has deep roots in Denver. He graduated from a small Catholic high school here, where he was an all-city, all-state basketball player for two years — “arguably the best player in the state of Colorado,” he says — and his appearance at this year’s Mile…
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…
Over time, French president François Mitterrand grew weary of the fancy foods being dished up by his chefs, and so it came to pass that a little-known provincial cook was invited, in the late 1980s, to take over the president’s kitchen. In Haute Cuisine, a diverting, fictionalized version of the…
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…
“What a shitty place to die.” Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…
In their experimental new film, the members of Metallica endeavor to translate the anger and pain in their music into a visual medium. Directed by Nimród Antalis, Metallica: Through the Neveris the band’s second big-screen effort, the first being being the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek both praise Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), saying the director exhibits a “lovely human touch” with film, which is set in space, and that it’s “so different than anything else he’s…
Fanboys (and girls!), start your engines — Joss Whedon is back on TV, and this time he brought the Marvel Universe with him. Hot off the massive success of The Avengers, Whedon has taken the helm of its spinoff series, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. The show launches him once more into…
