It’s Memorial Day weekend, which means one more day of fun — and the calendar’s full of everything from comedy to live music to donkeys to hug. Keep reading for our ten favorite events this weekend, and then head over to the Westword calendar for even more things to do.. Untitled Rising…
Denver moviegoers, your eyes do not deceive you. This weekend the Sie FilmCenter – our city’s home for the best in arthouse, foreign and independent film – is opening X-Men: Apocalypse, Bryan Singer’s latest big-budget entry in the comic book hero’s saga. This particular opening at this particular theater is a fascinating glimpse into…
Every year when we choose our picks for Best of Denver, we’re celebrating everything the city has to offer, from the best banh mi sandwich to the best all-day happy hour. If you’ve managed to make your way through even a portion of the Best Food and Drink awards in…
#80: Michael Henry New York native Michael Henry shuffled off from Buffalo, got an MFA at Emerson College and eventually ended up in Denver, where he and partner Andrea Dupree founded Lighthouse Writers Workshop in 1997, promising the community a beacon of literary arts where authors at all levels and…
At this point in film history, the slasher is firmly entrenched as one of the core horror genres. It’s been around seemingly forever. It’s been refined, perfected, deconstructed and reinvented multiple times. Even casual horror fans have seen enough slasher films to recognize the typical story beats and tropes that…
Even when working from source material crafted by others, Terence Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA. At once solemn and lusty, Davies’ page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
Outside of a movie-theater screen and red carpet, most celebrities go to great lengths to make themselves invisible. But most celebrities aren’t Shia LaBeouf. These days, the former child and action-adventure leading pretty boy-turned gonzo performer is known more for his bizarre and very public performance-art pieces and tabloid-famous exploits than for his starring roles in…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, Our Journey is back with suggestions for what to do “off the beaten trail” on Colorado’s central plains, “just outside your back door,” says the site. “Whether you enjoy photography as an artistic medium or as a hobby, there are plenty of subjects for…
It seems odd at this late date to think about seeing new silent films, but that’s what happening. “People are finding them everywhere,” says Tom Hart, program development coordinator for Boulder’s Chautauqua Auditorium and curator of the Chautauqua Silent Film Series. One rediscovered feature, Daughter of Dawn, will be featured…
There’s a spectacular solo on now at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Martha Russo: coalescere showcases selected works from the 25-year career of the innovative ceramics sculptor. But when I walked through the show with Martha Russo herself, she explained that she came to be interested in ceramics by…
Whenever I travel to a different city, I can’t seem to get Denver out of my mind. It’s like clockwork: Since I began documenting the changes to my hometown over the last half-decade, I have become obsessed with how other cities operate and treat their citizens. Last week I visited…
The metal door slams behind him as he looks up the last few flights of the stairway of a thirty-story office building in downtown Denver. Clean-cut, bearded, dressed in all black, he runs silently up the stairs until he turns a corner and sees a sign that reads “Rooftop Access,”…
The sun was out at Lakeside Amusement Park on Saturday, May 21, but that didn’t stop a contingent of goths in full regalia from darkening the paths for a takeover of the family attraction on the shores of Lake Rhoda. All photos by Brandon Marshall. Now see the full Gothic…
For me, designing things is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back cha-cha-cha. The interior of the tiny house has been redesigned multiple times, as I think through what I really want. And even when the stairs were half-built, I still decided to cut them out, build out the loft and go a different,…
Sweet & Lucky, an offering from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Off-Center in collaboration with Third Rail Projects, is not a play, but an experience. The idea of theater as something that should change consciousness rather than being passively viewed isn’t new; it was big in the hallucinatory,…
Books are booming this week, with Governor John Hickenlooper signing copies of The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics at the Wynkoop Brewing Co. on May 26. But there are other noteworthy literary events at metro bookstores this week: You can go local with mystery author Christine Goff, travel…
