Five must-see films at the XicanIndie Film Festival

Whether you are interested in cultural documentaries, classic dramas or anti-colonial revenge films, this year’s XicanIndie Film Festival promises to showcase the most innovative and intriguing Latino, Chicano and global indigenous films. Here are five must-see selections from the festival, which starts tonight; head to Su Teatro to see the…

Now Showing

Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…

Captain America: A refreshingly real superhero for the ages

Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — aka Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the last six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai food. If only he’d added ’70s conspiracy thrillers…

Paris plays an emotional proving ground in Le Week-End

The great insight in director Roger Michell’s fourth collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi is its vision of Paris as an arena equally amenable to romantic comedy and sulking tragedy. Thus the City of Lights becomes a proving ground in Le Week-End, in which Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play an…

Errol Morris Is Tired of Interviewing People

“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day.”I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers; murderers swearing their innocence; a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped that…

Daniel Salazar on the XicanIndie Film Festival, opening tomorrow

In his tenth year as curator of the XicanIndie Film Festival, Daniel Salazar decided to revamp the whole project. Working with film programmers from all over the Americas, Salazar created the Encuentro Mundial de Cine, an international curatorial collaboration using digital platforms to broaden the pool of films available to…

Movies for high tea: Top ten period dramas

Are you a prudish nostalgic looking to sip some tea, nibble on crumpets and harken back to the good old days when servants were servants, aristocrats were aristocrats and monarchs bred with each other over and over and over again, holding onto their estates through thinly veiled incest? Do you…

Enemy is Denis Villeneuve’s finest work since Polytechnique

“Chaos is order yet undeciphered” is the on-the-nose epigraph that opens Enemy, a forgivable sin in light of how gloriously enigmatic everything that follows is. Denis Villeneuve’s shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelgänger while watching a movie and mines every bit…

Bloody Floody: Noah Wants to Be a Mad Epic

To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special-effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass biblical epic. The ark built by Russell Crowe’s…

Sabotage Is a Belt of Bourbon After Years of Sipping Diet Pepsi

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage (formerly Breacher, formerly Ten), his third attempt — after the full-auto Western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in fourteen months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…

Rae Wiseman on the Jane Austen Society and why Coloradans love the writer

Chuckling in libraries and meeting halls since 1979, members of the Jane Austen Society of North America have been digging deep into the English novelist’s classic tales of romance amongst the British landed gentry. In advance of the March 30Alamo Drafthouse Cinema screening of the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Austen’s…

Director Lisa Gunning on the Goldfrapp: Tales of Us music-video film series

As Goldfrapp, singer Alison Goldfrapp and musician/composer Will Gregory have created a discography of breathy, synthesizer-heavy songs that carry an inherent cinematic feeling. For the duo’s sixth album, Tales of Us, Goldfrapp collaborated with Alison Goldfrapp’s real-life partner, film director Lisa Gunning, to build a series of music videos, each…

The penetration in Nymphomaniac: Volume I is mostly emotional

Let’s start with the ending, the closing-credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of the…

The Lunchbox is a sweet, slow romantic dramedy

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” runs the old cliché and the rather uninspired starting point for The Lunchbox, a slow-building, pleasingly low-key romantic dramedy set in Mumbai. Making his feature-length debut as writer and director, Ritesh Batra throws some emotional and logistical complications at the…

Now Showing

Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…

Shailene Woodley Proves More Human Than Divergent

Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that, yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…

The new Muppets movie peaks on the Silliness Scale

If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations. That endurance isn’t…

Suranjan Ganguly on experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage

Few filmmakers have pushed the limits of cinema as forcefully as the late Stan Brakhage. His hundreds of films forged a cinematic language that has dominated the experimental media world since the 1950s. Brakhage work is not the easiest to watch. Some films, such as Window Water Baby Moving, use…