Now Showing

Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…

Travel back in time to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and the rise of a reich without so much…

The schizophrenic Need for Speed never really revs up

Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race-car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated twenty-year, twenty-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in London;…

Child’s Pose cracks the thin ice of a haute-bourgeois life

Ah, the Romanians: Sometimes it seems like no one else is bothering to make movies for grownups anymore. With Child’s Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute-bourgeois life cracks and opens wide. Classically, we’ve got a character study under pressure, with Luminita Gheorghiu…

The Welcome Return of Kurt Russell

A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…

Veronica Mars is true fans’ fiction

According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…

There’s More to Streaming Than Netflix

As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalogue boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic-film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us, “If…

Local filmmakers unleash zombie doc Doc of the Dead at SXSW

The past ten years have made it apparent that there is no more room in hell, because everywhere you look, the dead are walking the earth. Zombies are a genuine pop-cultural phenomenon, starring in cable TV’s most popular show, sitting at the center of tentpole film franchises and appearing in…

Director Bryan Poyser talks about Love and Air Sex

Bored Japanese businessmen started the air-sex trend, says Bryan Poyser, director of the raunchy, heartbreaking romantic comedy, Love and Air Sex, which opens at the SIE FilmCenter on Friday, March 7, for a weeklong run. Air sex is the erotic equivalent of air guitar. Pornographic mimes boasting filthy stage names…

There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire

Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…

Stranger by the Lake is a thriller in more ways than one

For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage a…

Now Showing

Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…

Omar often finds itself in ethics-free territory

The latest chin-out probe into the mutual-lockjaw Israeli-Palestinian scenario from Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, zippy melodrama Omar immediately homes in on an athletic Arab twenty-something (Adam Bakri) scaling the West Bank wall and shrugging off gunfire in order to both visit his swooningly adorable girlfriend (Leem Lubany) and meet…

Alain Resnais Imagined the Whole Memory of the World

Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown on screen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in…

Three Reasons Why HBO’s Looking Is the Perfect Show for Women

(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…

The Meh Wayback: Mr. Peabody & Sherman

First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-time-stream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…

And the loser is: The seven worst movies of 2013

Hollywood peddles movies like a chef flings noodles at the wall. Does it stick? If so, perfecto. If it splats on the floor, well, movie moguls have enough dough to try again. The one thing audiences can be certain of is that each year, Hollywood is guaranteed to serve up…

Now Showing

Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…