Independence Day: Resurgence Is a Week Early — and 15 years Late

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…

Therapy for a Vampire Nails the Look of the Horror It Lampoons

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…

Filmmakers: PitchLatino Is Accepting Submissions for a Grant!

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…

Genius Dramatizes Editor Maxwell Perkins’ Shaping of Thomas Wolfe

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…

Pixar Dives Under the Sea Again — and Into Memory Itself

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 Directors of Tickled Dish About Going Up Against a No-Joke Conspiracy

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…

Eva Husson’s Bang Gang Just Can’t Even With Teen Orgies

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…

Netflix’s Suspenseful Happy Valley Focuses on Police Work as Social Work

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)…

TMNT: Out of the Shadows and Out of Ideas

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…

The New Conjuring Can’t Measure Up to the Old Conjuring

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…

Scream Will Give You Chills July 7 at Film on the Rocks

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…