It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman — yes, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional…
Nicolas Roeg’s wonderfully tricky horror movie Don’t Look Now, set amid the crumbling splendor of Venice, was made in 1973; for three decades, it has attracted an ever-expanding cult intrigued by its grown-up frights and relentless eroticism. Madstone Theaters will screen Roeg’s occult thriller Friday and Saturday night at 9:30…
The Arvada Center just wouldn’t be itself come January without another Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering to flaunt: It’s simply the rootin’-tootin’-est thing happening in town (this side of the concurrent National Western Stock Show, that is). The annual event offers four rustic days of campfire songs, stories, yodeling and a…
Not sure if you want to hear a band, support independent film or ogle some art? Aficionados of all things aesthetic are in luck as Red Reel returns to Rock Island, Lodo’s longstanding dance club. Held the second Thursday of each month and billed as “an independent film screening and…
January is not just the first month of the year; it’s also Eye Care Month, Hobby Month, Soup Month and — my personal favorite — Oatmeal Month. Seven years ago, the townspeople of Lafayette decided that they just couldn’t let such a big occasion pass them by, so they started…
The Jewish religion is no stranger to exile: Jews have been wandering for eons; they’re a people defined by diaspora. With that in mind, it should surprise no one to know that a handful who made their way along the Silk Road from Persia settled in the central Chinese city…
Studio Aiello, under the direction of Tyler and Monica Petty Aiello, is set to grow into a full-scale art center over the next few years. In an old commercial building and on an adjacent lot in the far north reaches of the downtown railroad yards, the Aiellos plan to hold…
Each year, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) selects three members as prizewinners and presents their works in an annual exhibit. The latest version of the show has the already-outdated-sounding title of 2002 CPAC Member Awards. (In fairness to the organizers, the exhibit opened in December, so…
It’s fun to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet in an auditorium full of middle- and high-school students, as I did when I attended Openstage Theatre’s final dress rehearsal in Fort Collins. The students’ giggles at the raunchy bits, half-comprehending response to the milieu and genuine grief at the…
Since it opened two years ago with Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, Littleton’s Everyman Theatre has been one of the metro area’s best and most interesting small venues. Now the company has closed its doors, a victim of budget problems and shaky economic times. Everyman was housed in a fairly…
As far as he can remember, he always wanted to be an actor. To him, being an actor was better than being president of the United States. Even before he first wandered into the high school auditorium for an after-school audition, he wanted to be one of them. It was…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form. Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter till he fell into the pile of easy money made…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
Come now, young people, sit upon an old-timer’s knee and listen: Once upon a time, there was a wonderful entertainment called the repertory cinema. These palaces of film history featured schedules of classics, cult favorites, cutting-edge works and beloved genre films that changed daily. We pinned the schedules on our…
Women have always worked well with others, so it was no surprise when forty members of the Colorado Women’s Caucus for Art decided to create together. The result is Maternal Legends, a collaborative installation of 128 Mylar panels stitched together to form an incredible ten-foot-square wall pastiche of personal mother-daughter…
If you long for the days of running to class just as the bell rings or discussing the impact of global warming, sign up for one of the 32 free public courses being offered by the University of Denver as part of the Bridges to the Future project. A year-long…
Everyone knows that Denver loves its professional sports teams, so let’s give a warm, woolly welcome to the latest addition: the Colorado Mammoth men’s lacrosse team. Named for the fourteen-foot-tall, six-ton beasts that roamed the Front Range almost 17,000 years ago, the Mammoth is ready to roar. For those who…
There have been a number of films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but it omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And although others have tried over the years, each tended…
They’re both gone now, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder, but they leave behind the bittersweet legacy of such Hollywood gems as Some Like It Hot and Fortune Cookie. The best of all their collaborations, perhaps, is The Apartment (1960), in revival Friday, January 3, at the Starz FilmCenter. It’s a…
World peace and global unity: Those inseparable humanitarian concepts seem to hit home a little harder as we segue into 2003, and there are plenty of people out there who aren’t really feeling the urge to party ’til they drop this New Year’s Eve. If you fall into that category,…
Most families observe certain customs during the holiday season: Some are religious, such as lighting the menorah; others aren’t, like singing off-tune carols or watching the Rose Bowl. At my house, the ritual was getting decked out in our festive finery — preferably something velvet — and traipsing to a…
