Starz Denver Film Festival November 19 Must-See: Viva La Liberta

Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights Viva La Liberta. See also: The Ten Best Movie…

Five Movies to Help Us Embrace the Ebola Frenzy

Every few years a new epidemic sweeps the nation, spreading hysteria among the masses — bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease and this year’s contender Ebola. The more you hear about it, the more you’re scared. It makes germaphobes looks like geniuses and makes you reconsider ever getting on…

Starz Denver Film Festival November 18 Must-See: Alleluia

Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights Alleluia. See also: The Ten Best Movie Events in…

Starz Denver Film Festival November 17 Must-See: Viktoria

Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights Viktoria. See also: The Ten Best Movie Events in…

Starz Denver Film Festival November 13 Must-See: El Critico

Again this year, Starz Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today, he spotlights El Critico. See also: The Ten Best Movie Events…

Eddie Redmayne Is a Marvel in The Theory of Everything

If the universe is infinitely finite, an entity whose mystery is knowable only through an evolving progression of theories and equations, it’s nothing compared to a marriage. Every marriage or long-term partnership is knowable only to the people inside it — and sometimes not even then. The Theory of Everything…

Jon Stewart’s Rosewater Tells Maziar Bahari’s Story

During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges earlier that year, Jon Stewart said, “We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.” Or about its…

The Way He Looks Teeters on the Edge of Corniness

Though it’s tempting to laugh at the endless stream of neologisms and cosmologies that Tumblr hath wrought, the nobility of intent is undeniable: Everyone feels the need to define and understand himself, herself or itself. (If I went through my teenage years as a happy goth, someone else has the…

Now Showing: This Week’s Art Options

Discovering and Interpreting the West. This ambitious three-part extravaganza at the Arvada Center highlights Western landscape art. The nineteenth-century examples are in the Theater Gallery, the twentieth-century pieces are on the upper level, and the 21st-century renditions — the main course — are on the lower level. All three were…

Showbiz Drama Beyond the Lights Is Familiar but Cutting

Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really,…

Dumb and Dumber To Is Missing the Original’s Magic Idiocy

In the mid-1990s, self-appointed cultural gatekeepers used to wield Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber as proof of the deterioration of film artistry. Those people hadn’t, of course, actually bothered to see the movie, and thus had no sense of its peculiar, sweet-spirited, un-toilet-trained brilliance. Times have changed, thank…

Richard Tuohy on Cameraless Filmmaking, Dual Projectors and Fly Screen

When Australian filmmaker Richard Tuohy says he makes experimental films, he means it. He runs Nanolab, an artist-run film-processing lab where he develops 16mm and Super8 film for fellow filmmakers. In his free time, he has devoted himself to exploring hand-processing, optical illusions and even cameraless films. Tuohy does not…

In Interstellar, Human Connection Lies Just Beyond Our Grasp

There’s so much space in Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there’s almost no room for people. This is a gigantosaurus movie, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dust-bowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan — who co-wrote the…

Small Performances Shine in the Mostly Charming Laggies

It’s an unwritten rule that we’re supposed to feel most in step with people our own age, as if sharing the same cultural and historical references somehow enables our ability to look into each other’s hearts. So why do we sometimes tumble into deeper friendships with people who are ten…