The seemingly innocuous school interview that opens writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime Like Father, Like Son is actually a master class in foreshadowing, as its banal questions and calculated answers turn out to be carefully laid tripwires for the thematic concerns of the film. Those include the roles nature and nurture…
Ulysses is dying alone in a decrepit trailer in Paonia. When we first see him, there’s an oxygen tube taped to his chest and he’s frying sausages, naked except for an apron — which he’s put on not out of modesty, but to protect his private parts from splattering grease…
A smart-looking show on display at Pirate combines pieces by three artists who first met in 2006 at Cornell University, which is why the show is called Ithaca, the name of the upstate New York town where the institution is located. It was organized by one of the artists, Pirate…
Congratulations, Detroit. In 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop cemented it as the most violent city in the world, an honor the Motor City resented for decades until its powers-that-be realized they may as well erect a statue of Peter Weller and milk the tourism. Twenty-seven years later, the attention has shifted…
Director José Padilha’s long-delayed RoboCop reboot has arrived, and it’s neither an unalloyed (see what I did there?) triumph nor the travesty that partisans of Paul Verhoeven’s subversive Reagan-era classic had feared. At least, and at most, it’s different, taking bold liberties with the original text, as remakes should. One…
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint the typical Berlin Film Festival film, I’ve attended the festival enough times to attest that most pictures in the competition lean toward the somber end of the scale: You’re more likely to see a drama about immigrants in tough circumstances or children left to fend…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival last week was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
The endless love in question unfolds in that universe where shy, bookish teenage girls are always catalog-model beautiful, not a pimple in sight or a pound overweight, not a garment from Hot Topic darkening their closets. The movie tells us that 17-year-old Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde) is “awkward” and has…
Just as animated characters who look too human creep us out, could there be a phenomenon we might call the RomCom Uncanny Valley, a case when movie stars’ gorgeousness fully outshines our ability to believe their characters’ humdrum relationship problems? Radiant lovers make radiant love — and then argue about…
Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, both of which publish special daily issues at the major international festivals, may be the most famous movie trade magazines. But every morning at any of these festivals, including Berlin, most critics I know – and probably plenty of industry people, too – turn to…
Dirty mouths are encouraged tonight at Mile High Erotic Spoken Word 2: Vday Edition, the latest part of a series that welcomes people of any sexual proclivity to gather for some sexy stories and performances. Created by Rachel Carlisle, the open-mic night seeks to offer a safe space in which…
Has love taken your breath away? Feel even fainter today at 12,000 feet, when Loveland Ski Area invites people to participate in the 23rd annual Mountaintop Matrimony. The mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony takes place at noon on the top of Chair #2 at Loveland Basin, overlooking the valley just…
“It’s part broadway show, part rock show, part freestyle motorcross — it’s like taking freestyle motocross and putting it into a storyline,” says Jayme Dalsing, show director for Nuclear Cowboyz, which makes its Colorado debut today at the Pepsi Center. Combining gravity-defying choreography with pyrotechnics and a killer soundtrack, this…
If you’re looking to break free of the dinner-and-a-movie date clichés for Valentine’s Day, how about a candlelit evening spent with a murderous lunatic in a bear costume? After all, if you can’t charm the pants off your date, why not scare them off? Step into 13th Floor Haunted House’s…
Known as the Sweetheart City, Loveland is proud of its heritage, including the annual Valentine Re-mailing Program, which reroutes valentines sent in from across the nation with its hearts-and-flowers postmark. But Loveland also has the Loveland Feed & Grain, a converted 1892 warehouse and grain elevator where the Arts @…
It shouldn’t be hard to convince the geek in your life to go see Knights of Badassdom, an action-comedy movie about LARP (live action role-playing) enthusiasts who accidentally summon a real demon. If you’re not already sold on the description alone, get this: It stars a rogue’s gallery of nerd-dom’s…
The latest incarnation of Love, Wonderbound’s Valentine’s Day performance, is the third show in seven years that the company has named after the most famous human emotion. “The work that I do commonly enters into the world of personal, intimate relationships, and we’ll have live music, dancing and poetry layered…
When it began in 2005, the Boulder International Film Festival attracted 5,000 film lovers. Nearly a decade later, the four-day fest has more than quadrupled in size, celebrating the cinema with 22,000 audience members. “One way that we’ve grown since that very first year is that people are really beginning…
After a monumental splash on the film-festival circuit, Tiny: A Story About Living Small returns home to Colorado tonight. In this documentary, filmmaker Christopher Smith panics: He is turning thirty without fulfilling his Rocky Mountain cabin fantasy, so he dumps his savings into five acres, sans electricity, water or gas,…
“Civic health” organization Warm Cookies of the Revolution will tackle the subject of food justice tonight at its regular meeting. This edition, called Soup and Dreams, should shed some light on issues like the cost of food and the accessibility of fresh, local produce. The evening will work like this:…
Amelia Pedlow’s father has been teaching high-school English for decades — which means he’s been teaching Hamlet for quite some time now. “He would drag me to every production of Hamlet that would happen anywhere, anytime, to see if it would be worth it to take his class,” she laughs…
