Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in…
Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
As a character, Games of Thrones stable boy (and friend of Bran Stark) Hodor doesn’t have much to say, except for his own name. Turns out it’s not even his real name, though everyone thinks it is. But in real life, hulking Kristian Nairn, the actor who plays him, does…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly. [Subscribe to the Voice…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys Targaryan was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’s most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there’s two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance in the film version of The Longest Ride, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience…
When you’re young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There’s no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the…
In 2012, in an act of civil disobedience, dozens of urban farmers gathered and took over a piece of land called the Gill Tract, an area once dedicated to agricultural studies and owned by the University of California, Berkeley. Occupy the Farm, which screens Tuesday, April 7 at the Sie…
How big a Game of Thrones fan are you? Some of the city’s most dedicated GoT watchers gathered Tuesday night at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for a first look at the highly touted bloodbath that will be Season Five, which officially premieres on HBO on April 12. Photographer Danielle…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
Clueless rich guy Tom Perkins rightly became the laughingstock of the Internet last year after comparing America’s “war on one-percenters” to the Nazi Kristallnacht. However detestably fatuous Perkins is in real life, it must be admitted that he’d make a fascinating fictional character, perhaps in a Greek tragedy about a…
If you’ve ever played music or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
Celine Sciamma’s pained, thrilling observational tale of growing up broke and black in slab-like Paris flats is no rebuke to Boyhood, but its besties-dancing-to-Rihanna rhapsody eats the lunch of that bit where Richard Linklater has Ethan Hawke drone on about Wings. They sing: “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky!”…
T.S. Eliot said April was the cruelest month, but that was clearly before he got a good look at all the sweet geek events happening in Denver in the coming month: Classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies, two conventions and our own homegrown horror-film festival are all on the calendar…
Fandom is a universal language. Once a TV, book or game series has sunk its hooks into you, you begin to understand all those other weirdos. That’s part of what makes local documentary Mile High Magic a must-see for anyone who even dabbles in geek, whether they’ve ever picked up…
Get Hard, Etan Cohen’s comedy about a white stockbroker who hires a black man to prepare him for a ten-year stretch in San Quentin, is like a spoon that’s almost-but-not-yet sharpened into a shiv. With just a little more effort, it could kill. Judging by the poster, in which star…
Some years ago, I went to see Tom Jones perform. He sang all the hits, but I was unnerved by his new walnut-brown goatee. It looked freshly trimmed and fake, like he’d ripped it off Evil Spock backstage. Superstars aren’t allowed to change. Even the fans who love them insist…
Noah Baumbach has always had a dash of hypochondria, but in the last few years, his doctor’s visits have changed. “If you’re a worrier like I am, or Ben,” he says, referring to Ben Stiller, the star of his 2010 movie Greenberg, “you’re used to going, ‘Is this something that…
