Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart, Merrin (Juno Temple), has been murdered underneath the…
When we first meet the title character in Olive Kitteridge, she considers the revolver in her hands and looks up at the cloudless sky above the woods one last time. The 25-year journey (and the accumulation of mistakes and bad luck therein) that leads the elderly Olive to that moment…
Keanu Reeves in John WickOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes). We also scoop out some time for John Wick, which helps restore our faith in violent movies, Horns, Nightcrawler…
Some folks are always jumping the gun when it comes to holiday decorations. Still, the idea of trotting out the Christmas ornaments before Halloween arrives is so bizarre that it’s just not done — particularly in oh-so-stylish Park Hill. Unless, of course, you happen to be shooting a movie. A…
Calling all aspiring screenwriters! The Colorado Screenplay Mentoring Program is now accepting submissions of screenplays from local writers looking for feedback on their works-in-progress. From now until December 15, the program will accept up to fifty screenplays on a first-come, first-served basis. Each screenplay will be reviewed by an expert,…
Nightmares tap into our subconscious and scare us based on our feelings, which is why fear knows no language barriers. So, while the world’s cultures are blaringly different, our terrors are universal. The world of foreign horror cinema is also extensive and terrifying, and a plethora of American scary movies…
Among its many attributes, Justin Simien’s exuberant debut feature, Dear White People, proves that we’re not yet living in a “post-racial America”: Forget for a moment that there are so many vexing problems entwining race, class and economics that we haven’t been able to put a bandage on, let alone…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced, here. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of a wrong man accused — or…
In Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton pours all of Batman’s simmering disquietude into a different form: that of Riggan Thomson, a has-been actor who hopes to reclaim his reputation by staging an ambitious Broadway show, an adaptation — one he’s written himself — of Raymond Carver’s “What…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the title of film’s most vigilant observer of American…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD drama End of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled sixty American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…
It’s awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen…
Scouring flea markets, thrift stores and film archives, filmmaker Kelly Sears rescues bits and pieces of forgotten movies and reanimates old footage to explore new ideas. But unlike many found-footage filmmakers whose works are an exercise in nostalgia, Sears reinvents histories to reflect on the current crises facing our society…
For kids, there’s nothing better than Halloween. You get to fulfill your wildest fantasies, explore your darkest fears and get a bag of free candy. It’s a time before adulthood beats the magic and wonder out of you, a time when you can still believe there’s something more out there…
Many basements, attics, closets and garages harbor dusty boxes of Super 8 films, VHS tapes or even mini-DVs. These old home movies show long-forgotten birthday parties, trips to the amusement park, babies cuddled by now deceased grandparents, all flickering moments in time captured but rarely screened. The Center For Home…
A gloom hangs over writer-director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over; Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as much,…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests that…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
Writer-director Hong Khaou’s slow-moving feature debut, Lilting, examines grief’s isolating effects through the eyes of two subjects: Chinese-Cambodian immigrant Junn (Cheng Pei-pei), whose son, Kai, is killed shortly before moving her away from her London retirement home, and Richard (Ben Whishaw), the lover Kai was working up the courage to…
