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…
The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness, but satisfying all the same. It’s like the multi-nationally branded ice cream sandwich you get on any pier in the Western Hemisphere: market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible (but you don’t mind gobbling it…
In his children’s books, Tomi Ungerer practiced his belief that books “should give children a taste for life, even if it tastes bad.” Bad taste is relative, as Ungerer discovered when sidelines in erotica and political commentary clashed with his reputation as a beloved children’s illustrator. Watching Far Out Isn’t…
In 1997, the programmers of the Making Scenes queer film and video festival in Ottawa, Ontario, received an unmarked package in the mail. It contained a videotape of an original film and no return address or contact information of any kind. The film, a five-minute short shot on video in…
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv-comedians-turned-actors-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all of the characters in The Way, Way…
Adam Sandler is successful because he’s lazy. Not in the sense that he has no ambition, or doesn’t want to work hard to maintain his status as America’s big-screen comedy king. But in the sense that he has built an empire by doing the same things with the same people,…
Adam Sandler pats his own back for being loyal in Grown Ups 2, an excuse for the star to hang out with his friends while he plays a Hollywood bigwig who’s celebrated for moving back home so he can hang out with his friends. Like its 2010 predecessor, Dennis Dugan’s…
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the cinema of the ’80s and early ’90s knows the majesty of Patrick Swayze. Over the course of a handful of films, Swayze crafted a composite character who was somehow the toughest of tough guys while simultaneously the sensitive sweetheart who knew just…
