The anachronistic anarchy of Archer, television’s best comedy

If you aren’t watching Archer, you are missing out on television’s best comedy. The animated spy spoof — think Austin Powers, minus that franchise’s fundamental stupidity and tendency to recycle its best jokes until they are painfully unfunny — brings a lot to the table. The cast is excellent, with…

The Westword 2014 Show and Tell Bucket List: #5-1

Since the start of the new year, we’ve been filling our four blogs — Show and Tell, Backbeat, Cafe Society and the Latest Word — with a Colorado bucket list of the 100 things to do before you kick it. We’ve already shared Show and Tell Bucket List picks 25-16…

Pablo Francisco on legal weed, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Shotgun Willie’s

Pablo Francisco is a comedian who has performed all over the world and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Mad TV. Reknown for his spot-on impressions and high-energy performances, Rodriguez is in town for a weekend of shows that kick off at 7:30pm tonight at the Denver Improv Westword caught up with Francisco to discuss his Dog the Bounty Hunter, performing comedy overseas, and Shotgun WIllies in a phone chat peppered with digressions and spot-on vocal impressions that print can’t really capture.

Kenneth Branagh directs Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit with aplomb

Russians still make the best movie villains. Since 9/11, Hollywood has been queasy about giving us fictional baddies from Arab countries — the line between cheap stereotypes and real-life religious extremism is too blurry, too delicate. South American drug lords have had their day, and Albanians in bad sweaters just…

The Invisible Woman is attuned to its characters’ sorrow

A tale of love complicated — if not thwarted — by prior responsibilities, intractable barriers and the rigid high-society norms that frustrate its Victorian characters’ attempts to live as they so desperately want, The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front…

God Loves Uganda exposes a dangerous mission

Can it be true that the apple-cheeked Midwestern evangelicals who send their money, their teenagers and their last-century sexual mores to Uganda genuinely see no link between their fervently anti-gay, anti-condom preaching and that country’s movement to make homosexuality not just illegal, but punishable by death? The toothsome young Pentecostals…

The Whipping Man looks into the conflicted soul of reconciliation

There are many narratives that celebrate the coming together of once intractable enemies — Arab and Israeli, peasant and landowner, torturer and tortured — with scenes showing growing comprehension, forgiveness, even respect and affection. But in 1865, immediately following the defeat of Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Appomattox,…

Frederic Hamilton’s generous gift to the DAM

Wealthy oilman Frederic C. Hamilton — named this year’s Citizen of the West by the National Western Stock Show — has had a long relationship with the Denver Art Museum and currently holds the title of chairman emeritus of the DAM’s board of trustees. It was Hamilton who spearheaded the…

Now Showing

Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…

A Found-Footage Attempt at Rosemary’s Baby in Devil’s Due

In Devil’s Due, co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (V/H/S) and first-time screenwriter Lindsay Devlin offer an uninspired found-footage riff on Roman Polanski’s demon-spawn classic, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). On their Dominican Republic honeymoon, the squeakily innocent Samantha (Allison Miller) and Zach (Zach Gilford) are drugged by a cult who draw…

City of Lost Dreams

Some novels take a while to get going, and some give you an immortal dwarf, a time-traveling corpse and an alchemical mystery before the end of the first chapter, like City of Lost Dreams does. The followup to the best-selling City of Dark Magic finds protagonist Sarah Weston in an…

Magical Mystery

Some novels take a while to get going, and some give you an immortal dwarf, a time-traveling corpse and an alchemical mystery before the end of the first chapter, like City of Lost Dreams does. The followup to the best-selling City of Dark Magic finds protagonist Sarah Weston in an…

Star Power

Describing the “personality” of a neighborhood without sounding like a pompous academic can be tricky. But for local artist Robert Bell and the folks at MegaFauna art and clothing store, the temptation to articulate what makes our city’s streets so vibrant and eclectic was too tempting. “In the Denver landscape,…

How the West Was Fun

One of the worst parts of being a grownup is that nobody reads to you anymore — at least not anything fun or interesting. “I’ve really come to believe that we never stop enjoying being read to,” says Anthony Powell of Stories on Stage. “I still remember Papa doing Treasure…

Be the Change

The idea of the poster as a call to action isn’t new; the concept of using graphics to foster social change is as old as revolution itself. Smart design — with its bold shapes and provocative politicized images — lends itself to the notion of change, and that’s the subject…

Pattern Pending

Gildar Gallery’s Adam Gildar has been a fan of Colorado painter Clark Richert for a long time: Richert is a fascinating artist with a fascinating history that includes a stint at the Drop City commune near Trinidad in the late 1960s, where his interest in the theories of Buckminster Fuller…