All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
Porn re-inserts itself into the art house with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult-industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star — two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex…
The lauded golden age of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grownups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
Five Easy Pieces was a turning point for both its star, Jack Nicholson, and director Bob Rafelson when it came out in 1970 (they’d already collaborated on the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head). Nicholson, who’d previously worked on a series of B-movie projects with Roger Corman and also tried his hand…
In 1994 there was a mass killing in the central African country of Rwanda, where the two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, were in conflict. After the assassination of the country’s president, the Hutu population began a systematic attack on the Tutsi; the deaths over over 500,000…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era–a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable and the…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine—bony, loping, a little shaggy—and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men characters…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
Film Fiesta returns to Civic Center Park tonight, sharing the sights, sounds and flavors of Latino culture through film. On Wednesday, July 24, and Wednesday, July 31, respectively, Luminarias and NO (2012) will be accompanied by live performances and panel discussions with actors, writers and directors. The events run from…
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…
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…
