Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced, here. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of a wrong man accused — or…
In Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton pours all of Batman’s simmering disquietude into a different form: that of Riggan Thomson, a has-been actor who hopes to reclaim his reputation by staging an ambitious Broadway show, an adaptation — one he’s written himself — of Raymond Carver’s “What…
Lord of the Flies. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is an anguished meditation on the nature of evil. Golding, who fought in the Royal Navy during World War II, was acutely aware of the horrors of which humankind was capable when he wrote this novel, which was first published…
Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…
With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the title of film’s most vigilant observer of American…
Jazz isn’t dead. Miraculously, there’s always a small but steady stream of young people who continue to fall in love with this most dazzling and elusive American genre, spending hours, days, and months running ribbons of scales and memorizing Charlie Parker solos in the hopes that some of the alto…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD drama End of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled sixty American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…
The Exotica Erotica Ball brings fire spinners, body paint and a “dungeon of desire” to its two-city double feature this weekend. The adult-themed and costume-required masquerade party, described by event curator Steve Wallis as looking like a “hybrid between burlesque and strippers,” has been showcased in Boulder for more than…
Is what we say through the voice of our social-networking persona more than just a simple status update? Decorated local poet, actor and teacher Wayne A. Gilbert thinks so, and it was the gathering of his own Internet postings that inspired tonight’s performance of Facebook Quickies: Poems From Facebook Posts…
With Dismember the Alamo, a four-movie marathon of undisclosed films, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is aiming to re-create that feeling of discovery and joy that came from surfing late-night TV for horror in the pre-digital days. “When we came up with this concept, we wanted to go back to when…
Soon after graduating from high school, the singer-songwriter-pianist Andrew McMahon scored a Drive-Thru Records deal with his Orange County, California, quintet, Something Corporate. Upon releasing their 2001 EP, Audioboxer, the emo-leaning piano-pop wavemakers were upstreamed into MCA Records (now part of Geffen) for their 2002 full-length, Leaving Through the Window…
Often mistaken for an offshoot of standup comedy, the national improv scene is always looking for its own way to shine, and this year’s Denver Improv Festival will try to shatter the standup myth with an array of local and national creative talent. “Improv is really theatrical; you’ll get a…
“I feel extremely re-energized,” says Brandi Shigley, the entrepreneur behind Fashion Denver, which is celebrating its ten-year anniversary this year. And she’s planning big things for the Fall Fashion Market: Elevate, the newest version of the clothing-and-accessory showcase that Shigley throws on a semi-regular basis. “We’re doing four fashion shows…
Bearded men from across the country will flock to Longmont this weekend for the Boulder Facial Hair Club’s second annual Beard and Moustache Competition. “We have competitors coming from as far away as Texas and New York,” says Tobin Voggesser of the BFHC, who adds that an all-star panel of…
When MileHiCon returns this weekend for its 46th year, the literary science-fiction convention will have more than eighty authors in attendance. That lineup is headlined by Hugo and Nebula award winner Michael Swanwick and the writing duo of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, creators of the Expanse series coming to…
The working title for the sketch-comedy show Vox Phamalia: Pity Pity Bang Bang was “inspiration porn,” reveals Edith Weiss, who co-wrote the show with Jeremy Palmer and the rest of the creative cast at Phamaly Theatre Company. “It’s a series of sketches with a comedic take about living with disabilities,…
Ruth Cave Flowers, who moved to Boulder from Cripple Creek with her grandmother in about 1917, came to the foothills town looking for an education but was nearly denied her diploma from Boulder High School because of her color. Flowers went on to became one of the first African-American women…
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, says the working title for his new book, Beautiful You, was Fifty Shades of the Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada. In it, he lampoons a few tropes from chick-lit and mommy porn. Sure, there’s a nod to Fifty Shades of Grey in Beautiful You,…
Jeannie-Marie Brown believes that theater is an important part of social change. She created the new Denver-based Stay Awake! theater company, named for a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., on the premise that change is a consequence of thinking. “At the core of it all, theater is a unionizing…
A taste of work from the University of Colorado at Boulder’s arts/academic glitterati will be shared in Denver tonight when the literary press and tiny multi-arts venue Counterpath celebrates the release of internationally known author/artist Mark Amerika’s new book Locus Solus, while simultaneously launching the monthlong exhibit Albert Chong: The…
Some people say that you haven’t really seen the continuing Chihuly outdoor exhibit at the Denver Botanic Gardens until you’ve seen it at night, when the nature-inspired, site-specific glass installations are illuminated with spotlights (and from within using neon tubes, in the case of one spectacular golden tower). Up until…
