The best thing about Denver Arts Week? It amplifies what we have here all year along, and especially in mid-fall, when local culture is completely up and running for a bright new season. From November 4 through 12, it’s the best chance you’ll have this year to explore what’s happening…
“Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear?” asks a conservationist late in Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson’s propulsive ivory-trade doc. That simple question cuts to the heart in ways that much of this showy, desperately dramatic pseudo-thriller doesn’t. The title is…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights selections for November 4-6: The Shepherd, The Last Family and…
The weekend is packed with great events, both indoors and out. You can gear up for Christmas or the slopes, laugh at locals, rediscover all the comforts of home — and indulge in bargain activities courtesy Denver Arts Week. Our ten favorite events follow; check the Westword calendar for even…
The entire time Gianfranco Rosi is talking, he’s drawing. Using a graphite pencil against an unlined notebook, the Italian documentary filmmaker instinctively makes quick sketches to illustrate his ideas and anecdotes. Counting off the number of windows on a ship, he draws three little squares. Talking about the deathly Mediterranean…
There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one. The director, an Italian documentarian whose observational films demonstrate a formal rigor that often brings them close to experimental cinema and installation work, has trained his…
Writer/director Zach Clark is seemingly obsessed with goody-goody women who hide a darker side. In his breakout indie hit White Reindeer, a suburban real estate agent copes with her fiancé’s death with compulsive shopping, stripper friends and raunchy sex parties; in Modern Love Is Automatic, a woman leads a secret…
Right now, Disney XD is probably best known for its increasingly relevant Star Wars Rebels series, as well as for being the only cable channel with an emoticon in its name — at least until the inevitable debut of the Trump 🙁 Channel. Disney XD is also on probation with…
Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive consists of a pair of mid-sized rooms and one very small one, so the space can get cramped when each area is assigned to a separate exhibit. The crowded feel is exacerbated when the styles of the art in the various exhibits don’t jibe…
The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District has been part of my life for almost all of it. I was born in Colorado in 1980; voters in the six-country metro area approved the SCFD tax — one penny on every ten dollars — in 1988. Denver is a better city for…
Over the years, the red carpet at the Denver Film Festival has been graced by plenty of terrific cinematic artists but relatively few mega-stars. So why was the crowd hugging the rug prior to last night’s kickoff of the fest’s 39th edition roughly five times the usual size? Two words:…
November is upon us and a bountiful joke harvest awaits. In addition to fine showings from our city’s theaters and comedy clubs that have imported the finest and funniest from across the country to stock our larders with laughs, our locally sourced talents are flourishing. Some fans may notice the…
#51: Phaedra High Phaedra High — Denver entrepreneur, event-thrower, maker and advocate for natural hair and beauty care — calls herself a “nerd with her head in the clouds,” but that doesn’t mean she’s not getting things done. A primary hand in producing the Denver Natural Hair Care Expo for…
Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights a selection for November 3: One Week and a Day…
The wooden troll figures that Thomas Dam began carving and selling in the ‘50s had a great deal of folklore behind them but no cast of fixed characters. Though the Trolls have since been in TV specials, video games and a short-lived series, none of those have established what we…
The Handmaiden, Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Gothic lesbian tale of romance, revenge and (light) bondage, is the kind of electrifying indulgence only he can make. The film is a loose adaptation of Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’ 2002 thriller Fingersmith, about a female pickpocket who poses as a maid for a…
When Sarah Waters published her gothic lesbian suspense novel Fingersmith in early 2002, the U.S. was beginning a relatively speedy transformation on the LGBT front, building to today’s legalized same-sex marriage and a presidential candidate’s full-throated support for expanded LGBT rights. Buoyed by that shift, Waters’ story of clandestine female lovers…
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is a film at war with itself. Which makes perfect sense, because it’s about a man at war with himself, and I’m pretty sure it was also made by a man at war with himself. The true-life story of Desmond Doss — a Seventh Day Adventist…
“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…
It’s too much to ask that a studio money-maker/sequel-generator like Doctor Strange actually be strange, much less flaunt doctoral levels of weirdness. Instead, it’s Strange 101 in super HD, its lavish pop-art psychedelia in service of 1963 comic-book story beats. The attractions this time are Benedict Cumberbatch, haughtily Randian as…
A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics…
In the hierarchy of exhibits, the retrospective solo ranks at the top of the heap, as it allows viewers to follow an artist’s aesthetic life through the course of a career. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is currently hosting just such a show, Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves, organized…
