The heavens dance. From the bottom of the world, where your eyes might freeze in your face, we see stars pulse against seams of luminous dust, all in slow and dizzying rotation. Then come the lights: Ribbons of green unspool and shimmer and whip across the sky, suggesting angels and…
For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices, or their inner courage, or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on…
Flip open your Bibles to Numbers 12:3 to find the first inaccuracy in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth,” sayeth the Good Book of our hero, played by Christian Bale, an…
Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence — cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy — Netflix’s Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site’s newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…
Whatever it is that Americans want out of life — and it’s not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a Thomas Pynchon story, before hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, move onto Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie adaption of his novel, Inherent Vice. It’s “in some ways a godawful mess, indulgent…
No matter the time or place, even in deep space or the far future, war is hell, and the little guy always gets the worst of it. But when that little guy is the hero of director Alex Cox’s adaptation of Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero, at least you…
People prefer to ignore the seedy underbelly of Christmas, but to be honest, the holiday is inherently creepy. Think about it: a fat, old guy breaks into your house and leaves you presents that he mysteriously knows you want. We bring trees inside of our houses and decorate them with…
Bob Knox and Michael Clapper. The William Havu Gallery is presenting simultaneous solos: Bob Knox: Real Abstract, which is made up of paintings, and Michael Clapper: Portals, which comprises sculptures. Knox is a New York artist; Clapper lives in Denver. The paintings mark various points of progression in Knox’s self-appointed…
Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…
Seeing a living legend laid up in an oxygen tent shouldn’t be fun. But in Alan Hicks’s doc Keep On Keepin’ On, it somehow is. Now in his nineties, diabetic and facing the possible amputation of a leg, the great jazz trumpeter Clark Terry lies there jamming. He doesn’t have…
Second in Japan only to Takashi Miike as an outrageously prolific and wicked genre geyser, Sion Sono is most notorious here for the four-hour teen-perv epic Love Exposure (2011). The cut-artery farce Why Don’t You Play in Hell is less typical, and a good deal goofier, riffing on yakuza films…
If we’re honest with ourselves, the teaser-trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens looks better than the original Star Wars movies. That’s how this week’s Voice Film Club podcast opens, with your hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly. Talk then…
William Morris’s “New Wave the World Over” film series came to him out of necessity. Frustrated by the lack of global films included in conversations among friends and film buffs about the New Wave era of cinema, Morris saw an opportunity. “When I talk to other people who work in…
As soon as Thanksgiving is over, Christmas is shoved down your throat — whether you like it or not. But just because it’s the holiday season doesn’t mean everyone’s life is full of Kodak moments bubbling with seasonal cheer. Sometimes you may want to celebrate, but sometimes you’ve had your…
The Starz Denver Film Festival is over and the holidays have begun. This December, expect a flurry of films, including holiday fare, movies made by luminary students, one geared for people with sensory disorders, a few wildly experimental films, a Technicolor classic and a social documentary. Whether you’re a Scrooge…
Minor spoilers for the second episode of The Comeback’s sophomore season. It’s no mystery why The Comeback, which returned for its second season this past Sunday after a nine-year hiatus, never became a big hit for HBO. Other mockumentaries like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family have thrived,…
Can profundity be accidental? Marshall Curry’s documentary Point and Shoot is a study in naifdom that seems to think it’s about something else: masculinity, honor, war. But it’s mostly about the way Americans of means see the wider world as a self-help proving ground, an exotic backdrop against which to…
Let’s get this out of the way now: Kristen Stewart is fine in Camp X-Ray, the tough-minded/soft-hearted drama that packs America’s sweetheart off to Guantánamo Bay. The fact that such casting seems unlikely might be part of why she succeeds. Tasked with patrolling a cell block of detainees for twelve…
The third-greatest scourge of the earth, right after online comments sections and bedbugs, is the unfunny comedy sequel, which may be why you think you should skip Horrible Bosses 2. The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn’t terrible at all. It’s looser, breezier and more confident than its…
The du Pont family made its fortune selling gunpowder during the War of 1812, and soldiered on to invent everything ever worn by a cop: Kevlar, nylon, polyester, synthetic rubber. If you’ve cooked on Teflon pans, that money’s theirs, too. That means you’ve supported American patriotism, or at least heir…
