Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise, but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal, yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through that will no doubt be…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove to be one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’re likely to recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is…
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale BART Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a transit officer. The officer later claimed that he meant to reach for his taser and not his revolver, but…
After a decade with the Denver Fim Society and the Sie FilmCenter, programming manager Keith Garcia is saying goodbye. Beginning August 2, Garcia will become creative manager for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, overseeing the programming for the chain’s newly opened Littleton location. But he’s far from cutting ties with his cinematic…
“When Beeswax came out in 2009, I felt like there was a sense in the world of, ‘Well, that’s another one of the same from him,'” writer-director Andrew Bujalski says by telephone. “That frustrated me. I wanted to shake everybody by the collar and say, ‘No, can’t you see that…
Mink Stole got wrapped up in acting when she met avant garde director John Waters in the mid-’60s. But this wasn’t just a convenient accident: the East Coaster had a real knack for the B-movie style. Working hard as part of Waters’s devoted crew — dubbed The Dreamlanders — Stole…
When William Friedkin’s Cruising was released in 1979, it was met with protests. The movie, starring Al Pacino, follows an undercover cop as he delves into the gay S&M scene looking for a serial killer, and the gay community protested the negative portrayal. Forty minutes of the film were famously…
Welcome to a new column called Geek Speak, in which we take on an aspect of geek culture each week. On this day 27 years ago, moviegoers got their first look at one of cinema’s rare perfect films when Aliens hit almost 1,500 theaters. Audiences loved it. Critics loved it…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
So far the funniest, headiest, most playfully eccentric American indie of the year, Andrew Bujalski’s perceptive avant-garde comedy Computer Chess — set circa 1980 with an Anytown, America’s worth of terrible moustaches and embarrassing pants — teases out unanswered existential and behavioral questions about mankind’s curious obsession with artificial intelligence…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
In his anxious parable I’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction as a pretext not for thrills, as in most films, but for a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not just the passengers’ lives, but the country’s. Defective landing gear…
There’s a gorgeous moment in Yoruba Richen’s documentary The New Black, currently playing the film festival circuit, in which two young black lesbian activists canvass an inner-city black neighborhood to drum up support for the gay-marriage initiative that was on the ballot in Maryland’s 2012 statewide election. The women approach…
The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in full-tilt evening-wear disposing of a bothersome corpse in a marble bathroom, or Helen Mirren firing a massive rifle-type thingie while sprawled on a picnic blanket…
Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
In his latest film, Before You Know It, director PJ Raval shares the stories of three older gay men as they navigate the world. A raw and beautiful look into the personal lives of different individuals from across the United States, the documentary explores the senior side of the LGBTQ…
Over the past five years, the Cinema Q Film Festival has grown from a handful of queer-centric films to a full-on weekend showcase of up-and-coming GLBTQ cinema. Keith Garcia, program director for the Sie FilmCenter, which will host the festival this weekend, says the 2013 season has a more diverse…
Starting this week the ArgusFest will add a second night for its screenings, at a new location: The Concoctory, a DIY creative space on South Broadway. ArgusFest, which started in 2001, has held over a thousand awareness-raising events focusing on human rights, social justice, media, the environmental and other important…
Welcome to a new column called Geek Speak, in which we take on an aspect of geek culture each week. Pacific Rim, a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters, is about to open in hundreds of theaters nationwide, released by a major studio and accompanied by a gigantic ad…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, then Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish…
