Very few advance screenings preceded Independence Day: Resurgence’s arrival in theaters on the evening of June 23. That’s eight days ahead of the July 4th weekend that in simpler times — like 1996, when Independence Day was the year’s biggest hit — was traditionally reserved for the biggest, ka-blammiest movie of the…
The most surprising thing about the new buddy action-comedy Central Intelligence is the sight of Kevin Hart playing straight man to another actor’s antics. In previous comedies, Hart has been the pint-sized, fast-talking dynamo at the center of the action. Even in movies where he’s the guy in over his…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
Has Paul Rudd become Hollywood’s idea of the face of economic insecurity? There his handsome mug was, in Ant-Man, beneath a Baskin-Robbins ball cap, his character making do behind an ice-cream counter while Marvel made bank in promotional tie-ins. And now, in The Fundamentals of Caring, Rob Burnett’s alternately winning/cloying…
Woodrow Wilson described D.W. Griffith’s notorious Civil War epic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones, which covers roughly the same period as Griffith’s film, is more like writing history with index cards. Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it…
When commercials for Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) ran on Channel One at my high school, I was ready. Vampire movies had dominated the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and at last a slapstick comedy was set to lampoon all that arty melodrama. High school me couldn’t…
This sadistic pulp-revisionist Western starts so well that you might feel something like loss as it ends: The Duel could have been something. The opening is all evocative mud and blood as a pair of knife-fighters, their left arms tied together, stab in a downpour. Cut to two decades later,…
John Carpenter, the legendary horror filmmaker, has been the focus of a Scream Screen tribute at the Sie FilmCenter that just concluded with last night’s Prince of Darkness showing. But there was supposed to be a special bonus to that series: Carpenter, who’s currently on his first national tour as a musician, was…
Aspiring filmmakers, rejoice! You soon could have $2,500 for a project. The Denver Film Society is taking submissions for its inaugural PitchLatino, which “seeks projects in pre-production that highlight Latino voices, culture and themes within the community.” The project is part of the Denver Film Society’s CineLatino Film Festival, which…
In cinema, all things move towards acceptance. In time, debates about filmmakers usually settle in favor of the filmmaker — not because detractors change their minds, but because the urgency of the conflict wanes, and stalemates go to the fans. It’s hard to believe that battle lines were once drawn…
If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant. It’s the story of the tumultuous relationship between hot-tempered, Asheville-born…
Director Jake Paltrow (Young Ones, The Good Night) met Brian De Palma at a party. He’d had a few drinks and worked up the courage to talk to the legendary filmmaker, who turned out to be surprisingly open and kind. The next day, Paltrow got an email from the friend…
Finding Nemo may have been a cartoon about a clownfish traveling across the ocean looking for his son, but it was also one of Pixar’s first overt forays into the workings of the human mind. The film, from 2003, was haunted by loss: The protagonist, Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks),…
The white-dude detective of Nordic best-sellers bears a burden other crime-solvers don’t. Besides his personal troubles — he’s usually a sauced mope estranged from his family — and the challenges of his case-cracking and victim-saving, he is also called upon to reassure readers that the rottenness he sees each day…
Dylan Reeve and David Farrier’s Tickled might be the oddest documentary you’ll see this year. It starts off with Farrier, a New Zealand TV reporter specializing in human-interest fare, discovering the world of Competitive Endurance Tickling — in which teams of strapping young men tickle each other for extended periods…
Teenage bodies are bared but fresh insight concealed in writer/director Eva Husson’s first feature, a dopey examination of Instagram-abetted adolescent abandon. Inspired by a news item that Husson came across in 1999 about a group of orgy-loving high schoolers in the U.S., Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), despite the…
He floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. He was so mean he made medicine sick. He’s the only person to ever beat Superman. The death June 3 of boxer Muhammad Ali from Parkinson’s-related complications left another hole in this death-speckled year. To pay tribute to the man,…
If mid-century pulp and noir gave us the cynical, quippy hardboiled detective, then Peak TV has given birth to its successor: the charbroiled cop, a bitter, corrupt, philandering, violent, addicted, nihilistic or just psychotic contemporary crime fighter. The supposed irony of this figure is that he (almost always a he)…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
In 2001 a friend, a grown-up, saw The Fellowship of the Ring more than a dozen time in the theater. Sometimes she’d leave with a half hour left. “I just needed to get to Galadriel and Lothlorien,” she told me. She didn’t need all the climactic fighting. In 2012 I…
The Denver Film Society announced today a late addition to this summer’s Film On The Rocks lineup. Guaranteed to add a much-needed chill in July, Wes Craven’s 1996 horror masterpiece Scream will slash through the silver screen in honor of its twentieth anniversary on Thursday, July 7. Scream, written by Kevin…
