The witching hour is nigh, which means it’s prime time for exploring haunted houses — including City of the Dead, a 30,000 square-foot Henderson haunt overrun by the most horrific zombies the metro area has to offer. City of the Dead is open nightly through Halloween; for information and tickets, $22.99…
Just in time for Halloween, two novels dealing with eerie Colorado themes are haunting local bookstores. One is a fictionalized channeling of one of the state’s most celebrated and puzzling historical figures, while the other is a semi-comic mystery dealing with seances, Riverside Cemetery, cab driving and other scary topics. …
Save your money for those big Halloween bashes; there are plenty of opportunities for free fun over the next few days. You can test your knowledge of scary subjects, debate the meaning of nationalism and kick back with cartoons. Check the Westword calendar for more entertainment opportunities this week. Horror…
Between The Night Manager, Veep and now Chance, a new Hulu series adapted from a nasty Kem Nunn novel, Hugh Laurie has had an exceptional year in television. The Hulu program stands out slightly above the rest, considering its resonant dialogue with the Oxford-born Laurie’s most famous role. Like House,…
Used book stores come and go in this town. In recent years, more have been going than coming, thanks to keen competition from online outlets and the growing popularity of Nooks and Kindles. So it’s an occasion for celebration when two antiquarian bookshops — one an old friend, the other…
When you step out of the elevator on Level Four of the Denver Art Museum’s North Building over the next few weeks, you’ll see a colorful Quetzalcoatl flying above the lobby, letting loose two trails of Monarch butterflies into the pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial galleries. They’re part of Las Almas…
At a fashion show, sometimes the style we spot off the runway deserves a second look. We spied event coordinator Rita Sater, a Denver native who has a background in visual merchandising, styling, design and makeup artistry, at the Fashion Group International and Jones New York fashion show at Dillard’s…
As we look to the future it’s important to remember the past — because that’s what this weekend is all about, with sci-fi roller-skating parties, retro toy shows and stories from the early days of the indie music movement. Keep reading for our ten favorite events around Denver this weekend,…
Arial StaxXx was born in a pair of heels, but the firecracker persona of 25-year-old Jonathon Torres didn’t make her debut as a drag star until the 2015 Ultimate Queen competition. That contest is known for testing the mettle of the most seasoned performers through fourteen weeks of makeup, dance…
The Denver arts community loves nothing more than seeing its native sons and daughters succeed in the wider world. This week presents yet another opportunity to catch a veteran Mile High comic crush on a nationally televised stage: Chris Charpentier will make his debut on Fuse TV’s Uproarious on October 21. Hosted by…
When I last saw Jada Suzanne Dixon, it was in White Guy on the Bus at Curious, and she was a single mother, a nursing student traveling by bus to visit her brother in prison, a poor and powerless woman who’s eventually confronted by a wrenching dilemma. Dixon couldn’t be…
This is a success story. This is Field of Dreams for book lovers. It’s the tale of two bibliophiles and their devotion to the intersection of the printed word and the land, a devotion that led to amassing an eclectic, comprehensive collection that starts with nature and man’s relation to…
Designer Katie Wells — aka Giddyup! — lives for Halloween, when she paints the runway with her signature bug-encrusted gowns and cobweb couture. Wells debuted her 2016 costume line on the sidewalk in front of the new Denver Fashion Truck brick-and-mortar boutique at 2343 West 44th Avenue on October 15, and photographer Ken Hamblin…
Conceptual art has a century-long history, dating back to Marcel Duchamp’s radical “Readymades” in the early 1900 s. By appropriating a snow shovel and then calling it a sculpture, for instance, Duchamp proved that artists had the sole authority to define what art was. From there, conceptual art grew to…
Andrew Novick collects things. Lots of things. But Novick is no garden-variety hoarder. Each of his prized objects, which are catalogued and line shelves in his garage, evoked some kind of story for him, and the collection, once the subject of a museum exhibit at Adam Lerner’s old Lab at…
In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing…,” the 21st century’s most…
Words can’t do justice to the singular power of Keith Maitland’s documentary Tower, a you-are-there reconstruction of the harrowing 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, where 25-year-old former Marine and engineering student Charles Whitman planted himself in the school’s clock tower and shot 49 people, killing…
Christopher Guest’s films mostly deal with passionate but ordinary people who aspire to positions of status within strange little subcultures: mid-century folk music, dog shows, community theater or, in the case of his new mockumentary, Mascots, the world of sports-mascot competitions. In the alternate universe of Guest’s first film in…
Don’t ever make the mistake of dismissing James Ivory’s E.M. Forster adaptation Howards End as a mere “costume drama.” Yes, the characters wear corsets and evening suits and talk through manners and inheritance. But in its own way, Ivory’s film — which has been newly restored and is being re-released,…
The most destructive villain in this year’s summer movies isn’t some super-powered fiend. It’s us, the consumers of North America, whose desires shape the world. The U.S. looms over Jayro Bustamante’s patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante’s…
Even those of us with a soft spot for dumb, high-concept Hollywood comedies might be outraged by the limp, unfunny nothingburger that is Keeping Up with the Joneses. A wan attempt to mix the comedy of domestic anxiety with the comedy of inept espionage — think Neighbors meets Central Intelligence…
Like the rambling fixer-upper at its heart, Merchant Ivory’s Howards End has aged quite well, and not just because of the brightened-up 4K restoration from Cohen Media Group. It’s brisk and funny, prim but open-minded, testy about pomposity even as it exemplifies what once was the most pompous of all…
