If you knew you were dying, and it was Halloween, your first impulse might not be to gather your whole estranged family together for one last night of spooky, costumed tomfoolery. Christmas is this whole other deal. From Michael Keaton’s dead dad in Jack Frost to Ed Asner’s dying father…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just fewer than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied non-fiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young and How to Survive a Plague. And were I crafting this…
New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis once said Phil Solomon “makes films that look like no others I’ve seen.” When asked to describe his own work, Solomon pensively characterizes it as “something like moving, poetic, musical paintings.” While we may never have a consensus on how to classify…
This past year has been tough for many people, and we’re eager to kiss 2012 goodbye. In hopes that 2013 will turn out to be much luckier for many, we invited some of the town’s cultural tastemakers — entrepreneurs and entertainers we’re lucky to have in Denver — to answer…
While some kids grow up following the antics of such superheroes as the Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, millennials in Denver with theater-savvy parents have grown up following tRUNks. Buntport Theater’s live serial comic book began in December 2005, presenting a show every other week focusing on its own universe…
The work of Everything is Terrible! is hard to describe.The easy way out is to note that it’s video collage, but that doesn’t begin to convey what this crew does with video. The videos themselves are dense, context-busting pastiches of pop culture and pure insanity. But as if that weren’t…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
Any Day Now is homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur Bloom — who based it on a real-life, high-camp Brooklyn neighbor (played by Alan Cumming) and the mentally challenged kid he looked after — has virtuous…
Set some sixty years before the events depicted in LOTR, The Hobbit tells of another unassuming Shire-dweller’s grand mythopoeic adventure in the company of wizards, elves, and — this time around — a merry band of thirteen dwarfs. The hobbit in question is one Bilbo Baggins — uncle of Frodo…
It’s dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what so engaged its hero: the women’s individual hearts and minds. Instead, Hyde Park on Hudson quickly introduces us (and FDR) to the president’s…
The idea behind the VOICES Mobile Film Festival is simple: using only a mobile device for filming, shoot a one- to two-minute movie about a woman that inspires you. While editing software and external microphones, lighting and tripods are allowed, even encouraged, the content must come from a non-traditional movie…
The year 2012 was a big one for creeps — living, breathing, oozing, killing-Batman creeps. So we asked Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl to choose the year’s twenty baddest from the scores of contenders. Continue reading for his picks — a spoiler-free selection of this year’s spookiest screen villains…
Joel Haertling is one of Boulder’s more unusual fixtures: a globetrotting advocate for experimental film and music, over the years he’s worked with Stan Brakhage and toyed with noise as Architects Office, all while curating the Boulder Public Library’s free film series. See also: – Architect’s Office is a one-man…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando Valley. Florida transplant Jane (Dree Hemingway) is employed by one of the area’s main engines of commerce, breaking into the XXX industry and cheerfully working adult-movie trade shows. When not…
Early in Waiting for Lightning, skateboarder Greg Hunt utters a surprising truth as he marvels at the giant ramp Danny Way has put together in order to jump the Great Wall of China: “They would never let anyone build something like that here.” It’s a throwaway remark that’s also an…
Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’s mere existence might shock many Americans. “There are four Universal Soldier movies?” those shocked Americans would say. They might also be taken aback by the bracing violence that marks the film from stem to stern: the gangland-style execution…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Holy Motors, the first feature-length film from Leos Carax since 1999, stars Denis Lavant, the simian, sinewy actor who played the lead in Carax’s first three movies, as a character named Oscar who inhabits nearly a dozen different personas over the course of a day. Steered…
