The swingin’ ’70s set the stage for Rush

It was 1976, a year when all the groovy girls were traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys had Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year’s Formula One World Championship. (The embroidered badge on…

On FX’s The Bridge, Serial Killers Are a First-World Problem

Mild spoilers up to The Bridge’s ninth episode below. Artisanal murders are all the rage these days. On Showtime’s Dexter, NBC’s Hannibal and Fox’s The Following, small-batch, labor-intensive, sold-with-a-story slaughters have become TV’s equivalent of the Cronut. Handsome, intelligent and mannered as court eunuchs, serial killers have become the new…

Reel Rock 8’s climbing films leave audiences with a lot to digest

Sender Films had the story of the year fall into its lap through pure chance. The Boulder-based climbing filmmakers had sent a cameraman to follow the mountain-scaling superteam of Ueli Steck and Simone Moro as they attempted to climb a new route across Everest and its neighboring peak, Lhotse, when…

Reel Rock 8 returns to Boulder with its most controversial film ever

The eighth annual Reel Rock tour, the traveling climbing film show that has become the gold standard in its field over the past decade, launches in Boulder tonight at the Chautauqua Auditorium. On the menu are four new flicks from Sender Films and Big UP productions, including the controversial and…

Jewtopia: Denver native Courtney Mizel on producing the new indie film

Colorado native Courtney Mizel is a lot of things — including the founding director of The Cell (The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab) in Denver, a small business consultant and former small business owner…and a movie producer. Now based out of Los Angeles, Mizel still does quite a bit of work…

Now Showing

Lines and Grids. This show, organized by Marks Aardsma, who serves not only as curator, but as participating artist as well, is the fourth in a series of exhibits she’s put together called “Art of the Real.” Aardsma is interested in the nature of painting and has invited eight others…

The pumped-up Prisoners nearly gets lost in its own plot twists

If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog whistle for Academy voters…

Meet new Denver Film Society programming manager Ernie Quiroz

A decade of continuity for the Denver Film Society ended with the departure of programming manager Keith Garcia last month. Denver film fans who came to trust Garcia’s vision needn’t worry, though — the show will go on, and the newest addition to the DFS family is already on the…

Sweetgrass Productions premieres Valhalla tonight in Denver

Boulder-based filmmaker Nick Waggoner premieres Valhalla tonight in Denver at the Paramount Theatre as the local ski porn season kicks into full swing. The follow-up to Solitude, Waggoner’s grim, gritty, and award-winning meditation on death and skiing in South America, is the opposite of all of that. See also: Sniagrab…

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Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…

Salinger fails to do justice to the author’s legacy

If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen, of course, could be…

Pleasure in the Rubble: Why the Summer’s Last, Smallest Blockbuster Was Its Best

We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-‘bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…

Mean Girls: The ten most quotable one-liners

Keith Garcia, creative manager for the Alamo Drafthouse, thinks that Mean Girls is the perfect, quotable high-school movie — hence the Mean Girls Quote-Along event taking place Friday, September 13, and Sunday, September 15. “Tina Fey did such an amazing job of writing that screenplay that there are so many…

Now Showing

Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…