Writer-director Tanya Hamilton’s striking debut is the rare recent American independent film that goes beyond the private dramas of its protagonists, imagining them as players in broader historical moments. Set in the Germantown section of Philadelphia in the summer of 1976, Night Catches Us examines the failed hopes of ’60s…
The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out; its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within the…
What a lark! What a plunge!” thinks Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as she steps exuberantly into her day, and that’s pretty much what I felt walking out of Curious Theatre after Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. The play is just so sweet, smart, honest and touching, such an absolutely delightful…
Playwright Michele Lowe writes well about art, and the central character in her Map of Heaven is an artist, Lena, whose paintings are maps of imaginary places, and who’s about to have her first big show. As the play opens, she consults in her studio with longtime dealer and gallery…
Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist breathes life into a celluloid fossil, lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great filmmaker Jacques Tati. Chomet sets The Illusionist on the cusp of the ’60s, around the time Tati wrote the script as a followup to his hit Mon Oncle. The title character, a…
Close to twenty years after the slang was first coined in those primitive internets forums of yore, at least one Fox News affiliate out of Los Angeles is on the case, intrepidly investigating just what it is that the kids are saying nowadays. Last week, the station dedicated fully three…
In Superior yesterday, a “suspicious package” left in a Costco parking lot triggered alarm bells, causing the store to go on lockdown, with shoppers held inside while the Boulder County Bomb Squad investigated. Why a terrorist would be targeting a Costco parking lot in Superior was unclear. In any case,…
The Academy Award nominations are out and they’re pretty much what you expected: The King’s Speech, Black Swan, The Social Network, etc. This is the second year of the expanded ten movie Best Picture category. And as these things go, the ten nominees are not a bad indication of what…
The beauty of chamber music is in its intimacy and immediacy; you can’t help, as an audience member, being caught up in the interplay and, even better, the moment. And at tonight’s Chamber Music Series Concert at the Denver School of the Arts, which raises funds for the DSA Orchestra,…
If you’re interested in stories about a sexually obsessed sister, deadly religious demon monsters, ghost drug dealers or practical jokes taken too far, boy have we’ve got some good stuff for you this week. If you prefer to consume media that keeps to the realm of reality, you’re out of…
Unless you recently awoke from troubled dreams to find yourself transformed into a hideous insect, you may have noted lot of Czech-related stuff going on around town recently. That’s because, stemming from Opera Colorado’s upcoming production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, a handful of Denver arts organizations have jumped on board with…
When you are introducing a new product to the populace, it is important that your ad campaign make a strong first impression. You might try associating this new item with an A-list celebrity, or you might open with a clever joke. You might also go on a serious hallucinogen bender…
The 100-foot launch tower erected in Civic Center Park for the Denver Big Air competition will see its first official action today at 5 p.m. (doors open at 3:30 p.m.) for the Nature Valley Ski Big Air challenge, a Battle of the Brands format that will pit the ski teams…
Being that the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building kind of looks like a gigantic DeLorean collided with the landscape of Tron, it’s saying something that Larry Green’s shoes came pretty close to upstaging it. In today’s edition of Street Fashion, wherein we talk to random people on the street whose…
It may be that the powers-that-be of Civic Center Park have Denver Big Air, which starts tomorrow, locked down tighter than a low-income high school, but that’s not going to stop the determined winter sports enthusiast from seeing it for free. It is, after all, an enormous ramp in a…
The NHL has commissioned Spiderman creator and general comic book legend Stan Lee to create a superhero squad based on every team in the league. They’ve been rolling them out for a while now, and the Avs got their hero over the weekend. He’s there on the right. His powers…
She’s not the first long-lost celebrity relative to come randomly out of the woodwork, but where most of them are deadbeat dads or biological mothers seeking a coattail-riding boost to gaudy tabloid fame, Oprah’s newly found sister seems, like everything in Oprah’s crazy, made-for-TV life story, to be legit. And…
For all those who give pom-pom critters for birthdays, feel an urge to stick googly eyes on everything or just occasionally get a twitch to fold some origami, we bring you “Gettin’ Crafty” where we feature a craft you can easily make with minimal supplies and limited finances. While it…
This week the Snowsports Industries of America (SIA) Snow Show is coming to the Colorado Convention Center, where all the major ski and snowboard companies will show off their latest innovations for the 2011/2012 winter season. Here’s one we’d like to see on the showroom floor: The one-off Signal Snowboards…
By all accounts, the first installment of the Colorado Music Gear Swap Meet at Cervantes yesterday was a success. The two-level venue was buzzing with activity through most of the afternoon as vendors and gearheads alike made conversation, purchases and trades of everything from keytars to sitars. Vendors included well…
Antonín Dvořák had strong misgivings about making the long journey from his native Bohemia to the United States. “America is full of Indians and wild animals,” the Czech composer declared in 1892, after the prestigious National Conservatory of Music offered him a teaching post in New York City. Despite his…
There are a number of so-called “drinking” holidays that roll around once a year — St. Patrick’s Day, Fat Tuesday, Black History Month — but those, as you once heard a bartender say and now like to pretend like you came up with it yourself, are like “amateur night.” Those…
