A French Village starts off on June 12, 1940, with a premiere that includes a German fighter plane shooting at children on a school trip. The scene is suspenseful but also staged with deliberate restraint, like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare before anybody quite realizes it. The series…
Let’s face it: While you might share some chuckles with your family and friends across the dinner table, Thanksgiving isn’t a laugh-out-loud sort of holiday. It’s mostly parades and football and televised dog shows (that is, if NBC succeeds in making that the tradition it desperately wants it to be)…
Yes, Thanksgiving Eve is a big party night, but the calendar offers reasons to give thanks all week — including a free trivia game at Ratio Beerworks, and a cool movie at Mutiny Information Cafe. Here are our three favorite free events; check the Westword calendar for even more to…
In the beginning — of the last decade, at least — 314 East 13th Avenue was the home of Bender’s, and featured a large mural of Johnny Cash, smoking a cigarette and casting a man side-eye toward oncoming traffic. When the venue changed hands and became Quixote’s True Blue, Cash…
It’s impossible not to think of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park while watching Bryan Bertino’s chilling and succinctly titled The Monster. You remember: It’s dark, and the rains have started. The Jeeps have stalled en route to their destination. The kids are in one car, adults in the other,…
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger, and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling’s novels, can the wizarding world…
Maybe you’re feeling a little paralyzed by the results of this election — I hear you. I am, too. I’m here to tell you that you are not alone, you are needed in the world, and you are important. And the good news is, you’re time, energy, talent (and money, if you have the means) are sorely needed
Depending on how you look at things, we either got a lovely extended fall or were robbed of primo skiing due to unseasonably warm weather. If you fall in the latter camp, you’ll be glad to know that resorts are finally opening – and offering more than ever this year.
Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. That’s not always a bad thing; there’s a perverse elegance to so…
There’s plenty to be distracted by this weekend but here are our ten favorite events under $10, which are sure to provide lots of beer, laughs and tasty chili. Check out the Westword calendar for more.
So, this is where we are. Like everyone else on the left, I have been attempting to process the results of the November 8 election and adjust to the idea of the new America we will be living in. But my immediate thoughts in the shock of the post-election haze…
#47: Anthony Buchanan An experimental filmmaker and film scholar in his own right, Anthony Buchanan also hosts the ongoing Cinema Contra microcinema, a celebration of little-seen work by local and national media artists that pops up at different venues around town. Westword caught up with Buchanan to discuss the future of…
Nathan Carter had a revelation when, as a middle-schooler, he visited the Whitney Museum and saw the creative and whimsical feat of imagination that is Calder’s Circus. “I remember being confused,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Wait, this is how I played with my toys. What was this doing in a…
Move your car, Donald. This isn’t a real parking sign; it is an artistic statement in the form of a wheat paste. “No Trump Anytime” has appeared in two locations in the Mile High City since the election November 9. The satirical version of a no-parking sign is an original piece by Plastic Jesus…
In one of the more bizarre coincidences of film scheduling, the brief life of a TV journalist whose biggest scoop was announcing her own death on air is recapitulated for the second time this year. Released in August, Robert Greene’s porous documentary Kate Plays Christine highlights the impossibility, even the…
Aisholpan Nurgaiv has never met this eagle she’s posing with — borrowed from a local animal wrangler — on a balcony at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. In 90-degree heat, she’s a 15-year-old girl sweating in her Mongolian winter clothes, including a hat made from the first fox she…
Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…
Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing…
With films like Take Shelter, Mud and even this spring’s somewhat uneven Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols has steadily built a filmography of terse beauty. With Loving, he tackles the kind of boldface subject matter that Oscar season feeds on: It’s a historical drama about the 1967 Supreme Court decision that…
Works on paper — watercolors, drawings and prints — are the neglected stepchildren of paintings and typically considered their inferior. So it’s interesting to see that Clyfford Still, an artist known exclusively for his paintings, also used ink, watercolor, pastels and paint, all of them applied to paper, as an…
Last weekend, the Denver Film Festival wrapped its 39th year after twelve days of screenings featuring 55,000 filmgoers and over 250 films from more than fifty countries. Now that the last bits of popcorn have been swept up, the Denver Film Society, which produces the DFF every year, has announced the winners of its audience and juried awards.
#48: Victoria Lundy Longtime Denver experimental musician Victoria Lundy conjures sounds out of the theremin, that weird, hands-off electronic device best known for spookifying mid-century sci-fi soundtracks and lending its spacey energy to 1966 Beach Boys tour de force “Good Vibrations.” A nerd-rocker, ambient composer and founding member of the…
