This April, let us celebrate the glory of the flowers blossoming in vaginal fashion by only highlighting shows created by women. The list will be shorter than usual because Hollywood hates women, and we aren’t allowed to create magical stuff, and the world is worse off because of it. Anyways,…
Cutting ties with the MS-13 gang proved to be harder for Gerardo Lopez than leaving his home town of Los Angeles.
Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens…
The premise for Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery is so simple and poetic that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before: A scientist discovers definitive proof of an afterlife, and the world responds with mass suicides. McDowell, who scored a sleeper hit with The One I Love — which…
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is available on demand. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House streams on Netflix. When writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins asked his musician brother Elvis to score his first film — a demonic-possession horror pic starring Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton and Emma Roberts called The…
CHIPS is the latest kitschy-yet-beloved cop show to get remodeled on the big screen as a bromantic buddy comedy. However, unlike the way the movie versions of Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street played up those shows’ alleged homoeroticism for ironic, lighthearted laughs, CHIPS lets it be known from…
As Denver continues to grow into a newer, bigger and more expensive city, local artists press on, creating art about the changes being seen and felt.
Niki Caro has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. To judge by the trailer, her low-budget breakthrough feature Whale Rider (2003) seemed a straightforward children’s drama about a girl overcoming the odds — tame, commercial Disney fare. But the film itself proved…
The Boss Baby might look, at first, like any other major studio animation release. Directed by DreamWorks vet Tom McGrath (Madagascar, Megamind), the movie hits all the expected notes: the enduring importance of family, the persistence of untrustworthy/clueless adults, and the inherent hilarity of shoehorning David Mamet dialogue into a…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters airs March 26, PBS Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived…
One of the sly jokes underpinning this striking indie apocalypse: If everyone on Earth vanished while you were vacationing in Iceland, how long before you would notice? Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan’s subtly comic drama, shot with a gliding camera and a pleasing minimalist style, proceeds from that premise, stranding…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
Don’t let the 70-degree weather fool you: winter isn’t over. Oh, enjoy your shorts-and-tank-top days while you can, for sure. Take the dog for a walk, check out all the shades of browns in the parks, put those boots away and break out the sneakers. But chances are good that there will come a night or a weekend when winter reminds us here in Denver that it’s not dead yet. And there will come a reckoning.Fortunately, all you need to do to survive that reckoning is to fire up the Netflix queue, and check out some of the stuff—all currently available to stream—that you’ve been missing while you were outside gallivanting in the weird Winter (and early Spring!) warmth.
In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…
Gina Prince-Bythewood has directed two of the most devastatingly romantic films of this millennium — Love & Basketball (2000) and Beyond the Lights (2014) — so it might seem odd at first to see her at the helm of a TV show about police violence, unsolved murders, and race relations…
Alice Lowe’s baby Della whacks two knives on the table as Lowe describes for me the nightmare she had before she knew she was pregnant: A horde of shadow selves in ninja gear were trying to kill her, and she had to battle Lowe after Lowe to survive. Lowe looks…
Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…
There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…
Somehow, MTV2, the channel that was launched 21 years ago to show all the music videos MTV wasn’t, has essentially turned into BET — or TV One or Centric or whatever black programming-filled channel you know about. The evidence is all there — before it jumped back to its original…
Since every cell of you dies and sloughs away so many times in your life, can you be said to be the same you at 65 that you were at 20? Such questions power this frustrating doc about William Powell, the humanist adult who happens once to have been the…
Consider, before you consider anything else about the sequel to Trainspotting, that the director of both films is an artist whose signal trait had been a seeming repulsion at the thought of ever going back to the well. Between the original and the new T2 (cheeky title, innit), Danny Boyle…
