The “Dracula Begins”-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace, swapping out all that bare-neck sensuality for some video-game ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of tragic…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the U.K. miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the world. Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus, is a fictionalized account…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel, The Two Faces of January is by no means great art; it never explodes the way a slick tale of larceny, lust, and blackmail should. But Hossein Amini’s directorial debut — he wrote the bloodier, pulpier Ryan Gosling thriller Drive — is stewing and…
The Boulder-based crew at Sender Films won the Radical Reels People’s Choice Award at the 2013 Banff Mountain Film Festival for “The Sensei,” a 26-minute short chronicling Daniel Woods’s trip to Borneo for an apprenticeship with climbing legend Yuji Hirayama after the local bouldering prodigy won an opportunity to train…
No matter how you like your horror, this year’s Mile High Horror Film Festival has something to frighten your fancy. Not only are there plenty of new films like Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, V/H/S: Viral and Exists to please hardcore horror fans, but this year a plethora of…
All it took was a hammer and nails and a recycled pallet to convince Kenny Fischer to start the urban DIY-upcycling celebration PalletFest, an innovative new street festival. “I live in the San Luis Valley. Life is a little slower out there,” he says. “And one day, while I was…
Emily Griffith had been working as a substitute teacher for Denver Public Schools when she realized that some of her students were dropping out because their parents — many of them immigrants — didn’t recognize the value of education or simply needed their children at home or work. So in…
Matthew Inman — best known in the land of viral Internet comics as creator of “The Oatmeal”, has accepted that he’s never going to win or even qualify for marquee races like the Boston Marathon, “probably due to the fact that I constantly eat like the world is coming to…
The tattooed and pierced beauties known as the SuicideGirls will bring their Blackheart Burlesque Tour to the Summit Music Hall tonight, and Missy Suicide, tour organizer and the group’s co-founder, promises that audience members are in for a show they can’t see anywhere else. The SuicideGirls will use striptease, music,…
Behind every classic horror movie is a great score. From the eerie synthesizers of Halloween to the ominous two-note riff from Jaws, it’s impossible to imagine a great scary movie without its distinctive music — and you only need to hear a few notes to get chills running down your…
After Jad Abumrad, the co-host and co-creator of the popular public-radio show Radiolab, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, “I was super spun around by the question of how Radiolab came to be,” he remembers. “So originally, I was asked to give a short talk about that — how…
In a post-apocalyptic world, what remains from the past as a new culture begins to form among the survivors? That’s the question answered in Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, a gently hilarious look at a world obsessed with Britney Spears and The Simpsons. Amanda Berg Wilson of Boulder’s…
When Julia Joun’s not up to her elbows in rose petals, exotic herbs, jams, Ball jars and dehydrator trays, fulfilling her role as a “preserving maniac,” she’s digging through catalogs of films and sniffing out the Boulder/Denver culinary scene in order to program the Flatirons Food Film Festival, five nights…
“There’s one thing I never do, and that’s oversell my shows,” says Normand Latourelle, founder of Cavalia and artistic director of Odysseo, the equestrian-and-acrobatic extravaganza that’s taken over the Pepsi Center parking lot. “But I can tell you that Odysseo is the most beautiful show in the world.” Latourelle conceived…
Last month, in writing about the now-closed Harmony Hammond show at RedLine, as well as a group show featuring a trio of artists at Michael Warren Contemporary, I noted not only that painting appears to be back as strong as ever, but also that abstract painting in particular is coming…
In the debate over gun safety, regulation and ownership, people keep firing off their partisan politics without giving the conversation a whole lot of thought. The LIDA Project wants to change that, says Tommy Sheridan, director of the troupe’s latest production, Happiness in Warm Gun, a six-part series of abstract…
The first thing you see is the Manhattan skyline — but it’s viewed from across the river, in Hoboken, New Jersey: a symbol, perhaps, of thwarted aspirations. An elderly man, Ralph Bellini, is sitting on a bench in a dog park. Carol Reynolds, an elderly woman, enters; she’s giving her…
“Once upon a time,” “heroes,” “villains” and “happily ever after” aren’t good enough for Shana Cordon, the Boulder-based solo performer and writer of Dancing With Demons: A Fractured Fairytale, a play about a writer held hostage, a demon gone wild and a narrative structure that vanishes. Cordon, who has been…
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, first published in 1954 — a time when…
A family on the move, another troubled clan scrutinized by television cameras and an uprising of the undead will all take local audiences for a wild ride this weekend. Keep reading to learn more. See also: Taking Aim: Happiness is a Warm Gun…
Sam Spina compares the attraction of autobiographical comics with the appeal of reality television. “Super-trashy reality TV gets good ratings — it doesn’t necessarily have to be good,” he says. But Spina, a longtime Denver comic artist currently living in Atlanta, doesn’t think it’s the quality of these art forms…
