Low Down Never Really Gets Off the Ground

Adapted from Amy-Jo Albany’s memoir about growing up with her father, Joe, the jazz pianist best known for playing with Charlie Parker, Low Down stars John Hawkes and Elle Fanning as a father-daughter duo with a lot of love and even more problems. A charming, gifted musician with a heroin…

This Week’s Art Options

Dmitri Obergfell. Yinfinity: New Works by Dmitri Obergfell positively vibrates with aesthetic and conceptual energy. The sculptures and wall panels that make up the show survey a range of image sources and a variety of sensibilities. For Obergfell, these pieces are linked by references to ancient or otherwise recognizable symbols…

What’s Hot and What’s Not on TV This Fall

There’s more television today than at any other point in the medium’s history, but there’s a good chance you’re stuck in a TiVo rut. That’s because, with a handful of exceptions, this fall has delivered a truckload of mediocrity and dead-on-arrival trends. (Goodbye, “rom-sit-coms” like the already canceled A to…

Film Podcast: Interstellar Is Grand But It Doesn’t Connect

Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar is a big, ambitious picture but it didn’t connect with our critics. We discuss the film at the top of this week’s podcast before moving onto a few other notable films on screens large and small this week. – The Disney film Big Hero 6…

The Top Five Election Movies — Our Vote Is In

This has been a grueling election season, with the television full of depressing news reports and endless political ads. The best way to avoid them? Program a movie, one that might give you a more honest look at elections, where you can augh at the irony, cringe at the realities…

The Ten Best Movie Events in Denver in November

Each November, cinephiles around the state gather for the Starz Denver Film Festival, one of the year’s hottest film events. Because the festival has an stellar lineup of directors, actors and critics escorting viewers through the best contemporary and historical cinema, it can easily overshadow other must-see movie events around…

Merry Christmastime: Film Shooting in Denver Seeks Mob of Extras

Despite the state’s efforts to beef up its movie industry, it’s still unusual to see a crew actually filming on location in Denver. And it’s even rarer that one of those productions announces it’s holding open auditions for scores of extras — all ages and types, no experience necessary –…

Five Best Horror Franchises to Marathon-Watch This Halloween

Horror films take place in an alternate universe where logic disappears. The villain comes back to life, the car doesn’t start and those damn kids always go into the dark basement alone. Instead of spending your Halloween partying with people in Ebola patient costumes, choose a classic horror movie franchise…

The Minutiae of Citizenfour Is Both Thrilling and Mundane

Director Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie’s a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as argument…

Force Majeure Is a Penetrating Study of Masculinity

Perhaps Ruben Östlund’s most sophisticated thought experiment yet, the provocative and wise Force Majeure is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses: masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous. Östlund takes as his subject (and satirical target) a comfortably moneyed Swedish family — Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven…

Now Showing: The Week’s Art Options

Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…

John Wick Is Wicked Good

Dog lovers and fans of the beyond-understated charisma of Keanu Reeves have a tough choice when it comes to John Wick. Those who count themselves among the former should know that the Cutest Beagle EVER gets offed — off-screen, but still — in the first twenty minutes. That’s not my…

Horns Lets Radcliffe Be Bad, but Not in a Good Way

Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart, Merrin (Juno Temple), has been murdered underneath the…

Film Podcast: John Wick Restores Our Faith in Violent Movies

Keanu Reeves in John WickOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes). We also scoop out some time for John Wick, which helps restore our faith in violent movies, Horns, Nightcrawler…

Christmastime (The Movie) Comes Early to Park Hill

Some folks are always jumping the gun when it comes to holiday decorations. Still, the idea of trotting out the Christmas ornaments before Halloween arrives is so bizarre that it’s just not done — particularly in oh-so-stylish Park Hill. Unless, of course, you happen to be shooting a movie. A…