The grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy — featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace — moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the…
CORE New Art Space, which hangs open-entry shows quarterly, decided to turn this summer’s into an unofficial Biennial offering. Juried by Ken Hamel of Denverarts.org and curated by CORE member Mark Penner Howell, the resulting show, Locally Grown, puts the open-minded CORE stamp on a showcase of largely unaffiliated local…
Pot-culture mover Mateo Pifaaso (yes, it’s an alias, but don’t we all have something to hide?) doesn’t flinch an inch when he says that the intent of this weekend’s first-ever Rocky Mountain Cannabis Convention and Wellness Expo is to “bring a little class to the grass.” The two-day con, which…
Terry Dodd loves environmental theater, and any play performed in the lobby of the historic Barth Hotel, built in 1882 and a longtime LoDo assisted-living facility overseen by Senior Housing Options Inc., is nothing if not environmental. That’s why the local stage director thinks Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin…
Set in a sad, colorless town in the Midwest, All Shook Up is a combination of Twelfth Night, The Music Man and Pleasantville set to 24 Elvis Presley songs. Opening with “Jailhouse Rock,” the show is about a young drifter who is released from a lockup and helps lift a…
When I requested two free street trees from the Park People’s Denver Digs Trees program and then purchased two more for my yard this spring, I thought I was part of the solution — providing shade, eliminating CO2, increasing my property value, not to mention contributing to Greenprint Denver’s Mile…
There’s a lot going on at this year’s Colorado Irish Festival, including kids’ workshops with the Denver Gaels and O’Connor’s Irish Stout, named for festival president Kacey O’Connor. “She’s retiring from the festival this year,” says spokesman Pat McCullough, “so Coors had a contest, a Name That Irish Stout contest,…
No one knows Denver neighborhoods quite like Phil Goodstein, who has written numerous books on historic topics and areas as well as regularly giving walking tours of the city. “There’s an interesting interaction that happens,” he says. “I’ve been giving walking tours of different neighborhoods for 25 years. A lot…
Burlesque is very much alive and well here in Colorado,” notes Laura Ettinger, director of public relations for the Colorado Burlesque Festival. “And if you haven’t ever seen burlesque live, this is the time to do it, because you’re going to see the crème de la crème from across the…
As a chart-topping group in the ’80s, Atlanta’s SOS Band bridged funk’s past and R&B’s future. It’s only fitting, then, that the act is headlining the 24th annual Colorado Black Arts Festival. The celebration takes place this weekend in the southeast corner of Denver City Park; SOS will take the…
It’s not hard to understand local fashion maven Brandi Shigley’s love affair with the landmark Grant-Humphreys Mansion, a picture-perfect epitome of the word “elegant” — at least as it was conceived of during history’s Belle Époque. The sweeping, thirty-room Quality Hill Beaux Arts mansion first provided the backdrop for Shigley’s…
Denver is chock-full of public art, from the Civic Center to the kingdom of Stapleton, but the best way to really see it is with a docent who knows exactly where and how to find it. That’s why the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs began offering its popular and free…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
With Sunday’s Final pitting the Netherlands against Spain, there will be a new country’s name joining the seven already engraved on the bottom of the FIFA World Cup Trophy. While this year’s edition of the quadrennial tournament is the 19th, there are only eight nations who have won soccer’s biggest…
Contemporary art is characterized by stylistic diversity, with a wide variety of different approaches vying for attention — each with its own roster of adherents. This week, I’m looking at conceptualism, realism and abstraction, all of which have long traditions and yet are completely contemporary in feel. First, let’s look…
James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate…
Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
At the start, Hedwig and the Angry Inch seems like a hipper, wilder, more raucous and contemporary variation on a theme that’s been around since Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright in the ’60s: the loneliness and ultimate psychic disintegration of a gay diva. But the show soon sets…
For Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, the biggest bang of this Independence Day weekend involves a different kind of fireworks: After illnesses and postponements, the long awaited heavyweight match between two really big boys – Denver’s own Shane Carwin and formidable opponent Brock Lesnar – will air tonight on pay-per-view television,…
There are so many Independence Day runs in Colorado that the Fourth of July is starting to feel like a celebration of running for our lives, not fighting for our freedom. Still, you can’t go wrong with the Liberty Run 4 Mile, which starts a few hours after dawn’s early…
As home to Denver’s oldest structure, the Four Mile House, Four Mile Historic Park knows how to kick it old-school style. Really old school. Throughout the year, the Four Mile House Museum hosts pioneer story-time sessions, living history days, Victorian tea parties and ribbon embroidery classes, among many other events…
