Derby Baby: A Story of Love, Addiction and Rink Rash, the long-awaited roller derby documentary from Denver-based filmmakers Robin Bond and Dave Wruck, will get its local premiere on June 16 at the Denver FilmCenter with screenings at 2:30, 5 and 7:30 p.m., all presented by both the Rocky Mountain…
My taste in popular culture is inherently gay. Not “gay” in a derogatory sense — I mean, “gay” as in I often find myself liking stuff only my gay dude friends like. Knowing nothing about her work, I signed on to see Kristin Chenoweth’s performance at the Ellie Caulkins Opera…
Young filmmaker Blaine Davies’s new trailer for the 2012 Crisis Skateboards team video nails the perfect mix of what everyone wants to see in a proper skate vid: It’s a combination of equal parts mind-blowing, technical, holy-shit skateboard prowess and people wrecking themselves over and over again, as if you…
It’s Colorado Rides Electric Day — who knew? Designed to ride shotgun to the World Renewable Energy Forum now at the Colorado Convention Center, the celebration includes a two-day Electric Avenue electric car expo that’s free and open to the public from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Representatives of charging…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
The non-fiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in First Position, a glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young ballet dancers striving to secure awards, scholarships and job contracts at the prestigious annual Youth America Grand Prix. Director Bess Kargman adheres to a now-familiar template in which…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years,…
In The Dictator, his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to…
Even after a committee killed HB 1006, thecivil unions bill, late yesterday, filmmaker Mike Shum holds out hope. While the documentary creator says he doesn’t usually consider himself an activist, he was particularly moved by the recent round of civil unions discussion at the legislature — and wanted to do…
Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy Father, wracked with self-doubt about his new position, on a walkabout in Rome. Back at the Vatican, the cuddly cardinals who await his return square off in a round-robin volleyball tournament. The…
It’s one of those eternal questions: Which was better, the movie or the book? You may find the answer tonight, when Cinema in the Stacks, a monthly literary film series hosted by the Aurora Central Library, kicks off for the summer. For the most part, perhaps because the library is…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Twenty-something Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A glowing blonde dressed in white shrouds with a respirator as an accessory, Maggie claims to have been born in…
A good portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed soap, Dark Shadows…
Jonny Copp’s credo for the Adventure Film Festival he founded in Boulder was “Make Your Own Legends,” and while the climber/artist/musician/writer/adventurer made many legends of his own before his death in 2009, one of his greatest legacies may turn out to be posthumous, thanks to the Jonny Copp Foundation that…
Darren Bousman gets all the fun gigs. He directed Saw II, III and IV, the cult classic Repo! The Genetic Opera and his newest soon-to-be-cult-classic, The Dark Carnival. Has all this success turned him into an unapproachable ass-melon? Not even a little bit. We recently had a chance to talk…
Local production company Focus 4 Design, which has done many videos for this town’s music acts, has won two Telly Awards for its work on Global Dance Festival: The Movie. The film, which premiered at Beta Night Club in late February, follows both the production crew (conflict of interest alert:…
As she prepares for a dinner party and fields rude dismissals from her two spoiled sons, journalist Anne (Juliette Binoche) thinks back on her probing interviews for a just-filed French Elle profile of two student-prostitutes who cater to a rich “bored husband” clientele. That entering this line of work was…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Over the weekend, director Skip Armstrong and the Carbondale-based Forge Motion Pictures crew premiered Nomad and The Mother at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale. The films are the first in a planned five-part web series titled Of Souls+Water, profiling five different people whose lives revolve around water; the series…
Batura, Winograde, Kunkel, Emrich. Though the current shows at Robischon are a quartet of solos — Stephen Batura, Edie Winograde, Jerry Kunkeland Gary Emrich— they actually function together as a coherent thematic group show on the topic of the New West. Batura’s masterful and monumental casein-and-acrylic paintings capture scenes from…
