Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio loves the media and the media loves him. So does the Republican political establishment. So does the Tea Party. Through his six terms in office, the 82-year-old sheriff has perfected the media stunt and used public relation campaigns to keep journalists on his side –…
Even in the most conservative areas, theater provides a home for the misfits, the oddballs, the outcasts and the rebels. In his new documentary, Skanks, David McMahon follows a group of performers as they prepare to perform Billy Ray Brewton’s raunchy drag musical Skanks in a One Horse Town, in…
While the first Colorado ski areas won’t be opening for another month, locals know that snowboarding season actually starts in September, with the early onslaught of video premieres to stoke the fire. And, for the second year in a row, you can see almost all of them in one place…
Today is my last day in Venice, which always makes me blue. Yesterday morning, on the way to my final screening, a tourist with an Eastern European accent I couldn’t quite identify stopped me a block or so from the sad and shuttered Hotel des Bains and asked me if…
Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent that he wanted to do a drama. It took a while. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable…
“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…
Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis). This is only the second presentation to open at the Rule Gallery since the untimely death of Robin Rule late last year. It was important to Rule that the gallery continue, so three longtime associates — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hilary Morris — are carrying…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’s fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in…
The Drop, the richly textured, beautifully acted film collaboration between Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) and novelist-turned-screenwriter Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), takes place in the present, but its heart lies in the noirish past of both movies and literature. In that shadowy realm, tough guys are endlessly quotable, and…
Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut has such a strong Jacques Demy influence that he might have called it The Young Girl of Glasgow. The Belle & Sebastian singer began God Help the Girl as a 2009 song cycle that follows the troubled Eve as she transmutes her anguish into sparkling pop…
The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…
Married women over thirty, here’s a pitch for a movie: My Dinner With Idris. You never thought it would happen to you, but one rainy night when your handsome and successful but distracted husband who doesn’t appreciate you is out of town, Idris Elba (The Wire, Mandela: Long Walk to…
This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.” Ninety minutes later, Smith responded: “Not me. Been hacked. Proud to be bi-curious, not brave enough to commit.” But the Internet already knew that…
What’s fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle, he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
With the DocuWest International Film Festival kicking off tonight, movie buffs throughout the city are talking about their favorite documentaries. To honor the genre’s long and varied history, we’ve compiled a list of ten must-see films for doc lovers. Some of these movies are famous, some are notorious and others…
Terry Gilliam fans have reason to be very happy — not only does he have a brand-new film, The Zero Theorem, opening in just over a week, but this week the International Film Series is showing two of his classic movies — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The…
In 2007, Sender Films began shooting interviews with rock climbers for a then-unnamed documentary about Yosemite National Park. At the time, the Boulder-based production house was already well-established as climbing filmmakers go, with four full-length movies and innumerable shorts to its credit. (It’s since added two more features and a…
Boulder filmmaker iKE ALLEN told friends that he was hoping to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show of country music. Days later, he got a call from Reverend Yolanda, a New York City-based drag queen and minister who was using her campy performances to spread the word of the Lord…
After The Princess Bride made Robin Wright a star, she shocked Hollywood by saying no. No to The Firm and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. No to Jurassic Park, Dirty Dancing, Born on the Fourth of July, and Batman Forever. She even said no to the cover of Vanity Fair…
If older-man/younger-woman matchups make a lot of people uncomfortable, the older-man/much-younger-woman combo tends to make them apoplectic. It would be impossible for Nabokov to publish Lolita today, now that all of life, and all of art, must be arranged, categorized and restricted as a way of protecting not just our…
