Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted’s Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Using interviews of fourteen randomly selected schoolchildren, Seven…
The animated feature has become the most tiresome dish available in the googolplex buffet line — more so than even the mopey art-house offering in which bad things happen to good people while string sections and Elliott Smith sound-alikes douse the soundtrack with dollops of calamity and sorrow. You can’t…
God is in the details no matter what you believe, but Jesus Camp is content to introduce its exposé of Christian youth indoctrination with shots of a fast-food- and flag-lined highway and the words “Missouri, USA.” Welcome to hell, kids. Missouri — yikes! — is among the holy lands of…
If Shocking Beyond Belief! Films’ latest flick, Here Come the Brides, is a reflection of society, you certainly don’t want to be straight. The couple portrayed is overbearing, pathetic andboring. The gays, however, get better food, better clothes, better parties. Plus, they get to corrupt the innocent straight boy in…
It’s been more than seven years in the making, and for the last three, it’s been slowly rising on a site just south of the intersection of West 13th Avenue and Acoma Plaza. You’d have to have been living under a rock — or way out in the suburbs –…
Almost seven years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver opened in a two-level space in the former Granada Fish Market at 19th and Lawrence streets. Since its inception in 1996, the MCA (then known as MoCA/D) had been ensconced on the mezzanine of 1999 Broadway. The MCA originally intended to…
The Dresser. The year is 1942, and England is at war. A revered but aging actor, identified only as Sir, is traveling the country, bringing Shakespeare to the provinces. To complicate things further, the actor is moving swiftly into dementia. The action begins an hour or two before the curtain…
An animated cartoon by German humorist Walter Moers that’s causing a fair amount of international controversy shows Hitler sitting on the toilet in his bunker as the Allies move in, grumbling that the war isn’t fun anymore, no one’s listening to him, and it’s all Churchill’s fault. Later, wherever he…
Everything that playwright Lisa Loomer says in Living Out about the blindness of the middle class — even the kindest and most liberal-minded among them — to the problems of the people who work for them is true, and desperately needs saying. This is a cruel culture for poor people…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
Let’s not beat around the bush: Saints Row is creatively bankrupt. The latest in a long list of Grand Theft Auto imitators, this clone replicates Rockstar’s controversial games so closely that the uneducated eye could mistake it for the real deal. But unlike past rip-offs, Saints Row is actually a…
Lewis Black: Red, White & Screwed(HBO) Like many other Daily Show success stories, Lewis Black is a comedian made for these times; his facial contortions and verbal tics are expressions of the Bush-era phrase “outrage overload.” But unlike other big names in political stand-up right now (David Cross, Bill Maher),…
Avenger (Warner Bros.) Calvaire: The Ordeal (Palm) Cedric the Entertainer: Taking You Higher (HBO) Changing Times (Koch Lorber) Confidence (Lionsgate) Deadfall (Lionsgate) Edmond (First Independent) The Greatest American Hero: The Complete Series (Anchor Bay) Harvey Toons: The Complete Collection (Sony Wonder) Humphrey Bogart: The Signature Collection, Volumes 1 & 2…
Herd your posse of ragtag cowboys and Indians into the minivan for three days of Old West fun. Starting today and continuing through Sunday, the quickest guns in the land will be competing at Cripple Creek’s National World Fast-Draw Competition as part of the town’s Frontier & Chuckwagon Daze, which…
John Erhardt, the founder of Drinking Liberally Denver, has a message for all the left-wingers out there: “To people who have maybe heard of Drinking Liberally but have never been to an event, this would be the event not to be missed.” This event is the second annual Drinking Liberally…
Go ahead: Risk the thirty-minute drive today and you’ll find yourself savoring autumn on the Front Range during the Mountain Area Land Trust Watershed Trail Festival, happening from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. along the scenic Beaver Brook Watershed, which is located 3.5 miles west of Evergreen on state highway…
The Greatest Show on Earth withstood the Great Depression; it persevered through two turns of the centuries; it even gave harried moms something to yell at their children: “I am not running a three-ring circus here!” But can it survive modern audiences who crave the high-tech appeal of Cirque du…
“My mom always makes comments about how shy I was when I was young, and she just can’t believe that I’m doing what I’m doing,” says Burlesque As It Was founder and dancer Vivienne VaVoom — aka Michelle Baldwin, a Westword contributor. “It’s changed the way I dress, the way…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
There’s something comic — and a little spooky — about the sight of Kevin Costner in rubber flippers and a diving mask. Granted, it’s been more than a decade since the $180 million fiasco of Waterworld, but you’d think that an older, wiser, fleshier Costner would hesitate before so much…
A variant of what military leaders call “the fog of war” shrouds much of The Blood of My Brother, Andrew Berends’s unsettling and uncensored documentary about the effects of the American occupation in Iraq. In the film’s first scene, we behold a black-clad middle-aged Iraqi woman and her nineteen-year-old son…
Sweet, crazy and tinged with sadness, The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Michel Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s script. The look,…
