Perhaps fitting for a celebration of a musician whose polyrhythmic extravaganzas tended to run twenty-plus minutes, Alex Gibney’s doc Finding Fela takes a while to get started. The opening scenes focus on rehearsals for Broadway’s Fela!, and early on, Gibney shows us more footage of stage-Fela Sahr Ngaujah than of…
Joseph Coniff (in parenthesis). This is only the second presentation to open at the Rule Gallery since the untimely death of Robin Rule late last year. It was important to Rule that the gallery continue, so three longtime associates — Valerie Santerli, Rachel Beitz and Hilary Morris — are carrying…
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and…
Quentin Tarantino’s movies have incurred the wrath of many. In Newsweek, Daniel Mendelsohn accused Inglorious Basterds of turning Jews into Nazis, arguing that the film was cashing in on the fragile nature of historical memory. Spike Lee has criticized Tarantino for nearly two decades. He went so far as to…
With summer fading away, the studios are releasing the last blockbusters and many moviegoers are dreading the pre-Oscar lull. Fear not, cinephiles. Denver’s movie scene is vibrant. This month you can huddle up and catch a doc at Sports Authority Field, drink a beer and watch a horror flick at…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against Internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy. [Subscribe…
Colorado’s independent film scene is booming, says filmmaker and photographer Ralph-Michael Giordano, whose exhibition A Colorado Tribute to Classic Hollywood will be featured at Tenn Street Coffee and Books on First Friday, as part of the Tennyson Street Artwalk. Giordano has spent the last six months rebooting classic photographs of…
If you’re afraid that your kids’ entertainment isn’t sufficiently weird, there’s help out there. The second season of Gravity Falls kicks off August 1 on the Disney Channel (don’t let that scare you off!), and there’s no better way to indoctrinate your kids into the world of the surreal and…
Who was the first African American to play Major League Baseball? Jackie Robinson, of course. Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, two other black ball players who joined the majors in 1947, aren’t remembered as well, although they experienced the same brutal racism that Robinson did. And although Robinson is often…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to “Please, Please, Please” speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
Outside in 303.This summer feature at the Museo de las Amesricas is absolutely spectacular, with each of the included artists being given lots of space to stretch out. Conceived and organized by Museo director Maruca Salazar with help from the Denver Art Museum’s Gwen Chanzit, the show looks at a…
Beware the movie that’s Fun with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist — a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of…
In Tate Taylor’s subtly extraordinary James Brown biopic Get On Up, Chadwick Boseman plays the man who, seemingly just by willing it to be so, became the Godfather of Soul. Get On Up isn’t a perfect picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don’t quite pay off. But…
Land Ho! is essentially How Grandpa Got His Groove Back, a buddy road trip through Iceland, starring two divorced men with a combined age of 150 years. The writer-directors, Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, are 30 and 34, respectively, young enough to be their leading men’s grandchildren but just old…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
It takes grit to make a movie in Colorado — sometimes True Grit. This state’s film industry has gotten mixed reviews over the years, but there’s no question that producer Hal Wallis created a classic when he made True Grit, based on the book by Charles Portis, in Colorado in…
Code Black — which opens Friday, August 1, at the Sie FilmCenter — reminds viewers of an astonishing reality of the health-care industry: In emergencies, seconds count. The documentary follows Ryan McGarry, a physician who trained in the trauma bay at Los Angeles County Hospital and brought cameras along for…
Too hot to hike? Escaping into a movie theater to glut on popcorn and blockbuster films is one of the tried and true ways to beat the blazing summer sun. Sure, these $200 million Hollywood titans sometimes crash — but even if they let you down, you can bank on…
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall continues to defy legal threats and issue same-sex marriage licenses — just as Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Clela Rorex did four decades ago. In his documentary Limited Partnership, the closing night film at this year’s Cinema Q film festival, filmmaker Tom Miller…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. [Subscribe to the Voice Film Club…
With the booming Denver housing market and the influx of hipsters struggling to find meaning in a culture built on a bedrock of irony and flippant fashion, visiting Brooklyn — ground zero for vacuous aesthetes — is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future Queen City of…
