Despite an evening rain shower, folks of all ages had a roaring good time Tuesday night at the Film on the Rocks screening of Jurassic World, complete with a pre-movie set by the School Of Rock All-Stars. Photographer Brandon Marshall brought back these images of all the prehistoric partying. Now see…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson and the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl in New York disagree on just about everything in Ted 2 — except that it has a few very funny moments — but only after revisiting the impressive Inside Out, which is nearly…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
Denver horror film fans, rejoice! Theresa Mercado, your scream queen, is back on her deadly throne and she’s putting her Best of Denver award for Best Bloodthirsty Movie Host to good use by taking her scary Screen Scream series to the Sie FilmCenter, where it will kick off Thursday with a…
The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways, it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Like Dazed & Confused or The Breakfast Club, this is a film about just how weird the extraordinarily normal kids are — kids like you. The teen…
Forget the Orange Is the New Black bingewatch you’d planned for this week, because your eyes need to stay focused on one of the most ambitious but exciting festivals to come to the Mile High City. SeriesFest: Season One is a brand-new festival coming out of Denver – the birthplace…
Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen-cancer weepie ever made — if there even is a best teen-cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a Wimpy…
For film fanatics, it boggles the mind that a generation of movie-watchers have no idea what seeing cinema on 35mm film is like. The phasing out of this grand format, along with the slow death of the repertory movie house, is the focus of Julia Marchese’s documentary Out Of Print,…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returned June 12 for its third season, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips in…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
Denver is an ideal place for outdoor movies; our normally cool, dry and clear evenings make for superb viewing. While the metro area once sported more than two dozen drive-ins, it’s now down to two: the 88 Drive-In Theatre and the Denver Mart Drive-In, which opens June 12. But there…
One of the funniest things in Live From New York!, the latest repackaging of Saturday Night Live history, comes from Amy Poehler, describing the institution that made her a star: “SNL — the show your parents used to have sex to that now you watch during the day.” Something almost…
In its last moments, Amy Berg’s exposé of sexual predators among Hollywood’s management classes offers a curious disclaimer: “The filmmakers acknowledge that this is not a gender based issue,” a title reads, just before the closing credits. “We chose to tell these specific stories, but they are representations of a…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
Twenty years back, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors: an alert immobility, shadowed and mostly…
