Using a fluid naturalism to establish its afterglow vibe, Four Lovers follows two married couples as they swap partners and invigorate their own marriages in the bargain — for a time, at least. Boutique jeweler Rachel (Marina Foïs) is unable to resist tattooed Web designer Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle), so she…
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…
Back with his first film in fourteen years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. That’s true with respect to both the singularity of his deadpan, dialogic style and his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s followup to 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, the urban-haute-bourgeoisie-as-endangered-species…
A twelve-year-old degenerate needs a spot for daily operations: someplace that’s secluded, where he can stash his collection of pornos and light a bunch of weird shit on fire, and no one will bother him. For my best friend Noah and me, the central vector for our troublemaking was behind…
Nick Apollo Forte, who’ll perform in Denver for the first time in two decades on Sunday, April 22, at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, is best known for playing the lounge singer Lou Canova in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. But Forte is much more than a singer: He started off as…
Disneynature’s latest Earth Day release hunkers down in an Ivory Coast rainforest, taming its beasts-in-the-wild raw material into a family-friendly (though not totally sugarcoated) heroes-and-villains adventure, as did the brand’s previous film, African Cats. Chimpanzee follows energetic young primate Oscar, still reliant on his mother, Isha, for food and protection…
It’s Nicholas Sparks’s world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written sixteen bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The Notebook was the third Sparks work…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Marley, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican legend, who…
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…
Some of our favorite local skate crews have been busy this month, dropping Spring video clips that will have you ready to take to the streets. First up… Ben Ericson and Tristan Minton’s 2012 Spring Street Trash edit (above) featuring the 303 Boards team…
Last night, Tuaca brought Corey Miller (think L.A. Ink — and if you’ve seen that show, then you know how talented he is) to Stoney’s Bar and Grill to play with his band, Powerflex 5. We caught up with Miller before the show (while he placed the finishing touches on…
Director/producer Todd Cassetty is used to working with pop sensations like Taylor Swift. He produced two Taylor Swift music videos and seven Taylor Swift TV specials — most notably, her 2010 NBC Thanksgiving Special. More recently, though Cassetty has set his sights on a culture somewhat less predictable than his…
Besides blowing the mind of everyone who ever heard it, Sgt. Pepper broke a lot of ground: The album radically expanded the concept of what pop music could be, in the process inventing the studio technology needed to make it happen. There’s probably not another person alive who can articulate…
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…
Arriving in theaters on a wave of free publicity — its distributor, the Weinstein Company, butted heads with the MPAA over an initial R rating; it was eventually edited to land a PG-13 — Lee Hirsch’s Bully is something of an outlier among awareness docs: It has a clear and…
At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really. The real spoilers in the film are in the tricky mechanics crafted by writers Joss Whedon…
Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) is a polite Jewish boy from fictional Orangetown, Massachusetts, whose one God-given talent is having a skull made of granite and, on command, a rock-’em-sock-’em left-right combination. Doug is a bouncer, but his middle-class parents (Eugene Levy and Ellen David), in denial that their son…
This is not the best time of year for new movies. So we have Wrath of the Titans, Mirror Mirror and American Reunion. Judging by the box office receipts, you went and saw Hunger Games like everyone else, and were probably were angry that Jennifer Lawrence is too fat and…
Gary Emrich. Though paintings and sculptures are the stock-in-trade of its Modern and Contemporary department, the Denver Art Museum also puts the spotlight on new media, such as video, in its own dedicated space, called the Fuse Box. That’s where Gary Emrich: Contact is midway through its run. Emrich, whose…
Soft-spoken Harvard poli-sci professor Gene Sharp is an unlikely mentor for the architects of the Arab Spring. But as first-time documentarian Ruaridh Arrow reveals and ultimately belabors, Sharp’s 1993 handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy helped influence the resistance movements in Egypt and Syria and, before that, in Serbia, the Ukraine,…
Suelynn Gustafson was doing goth before it was cool. In fact, Suelynn Gustafson was doing goth about five decades before anyone even thought to call it goth, let alone cool, and furthermore, she doesn’t mind telling you that she doesn’t think much of the teenyboppers doing it today. “I think…
There’s a lot of mythologizing in All In, an adoring, exhaustive survey of the last decade’s poker boom and its impact on the culture. Director Douglas Tirola tries so hard to make poker a central metaphor for the new American Dream that at times the relentless stream of hot air…
