Best New Festival — Mountains

Cool! The little mountain town of Nederland came up with a novel way to heat up the winter tourism business: Frozen Dead Guy Days, a festival celebrating Bredo Morstoel, the Norwegian man whose body was frozen after he died back in 1989 and is currently stored in a shed behind…

Best New Festival — City

Dragon-boat racing originated some 2,000 years ago in China. But here in the United States, it’s an up-and-coming sport in which anyone who’s willing (and has a strong constitution) can participate. All that you and your twenty-person team have to do is paddle like hell and hope you can maneuver…

Best Literary Tours

Introduced on the City of Denver’s Web site in February, Denver’s Beat Poetry Driving Tour and Denver’s Literary Landmarks were designed to give both visitors to and residents of the Mile High City a little lesson in local literary lions. The first tour focuses on Beat Generation legends Jack Kerouac…

Best Literary Homage

Back in the ’50s, a group of Denver journalists and authors would gather at local watering holes to trade wet witticisms about writing. The Evil Companions, they called themselves — and not without reason. A decade ago, this admirable tradition was resurrected in the form of the Evil Companions Literary…

Best Literary Legacy

Eleanor Gehres, who spent 25 years as head of the Denver Public Library’s Western History/Genealogy Department and made it the institution it is today, is gone — but very far from forgotten. Before her death from cancer last year, she had almost finished a massive mission: determining the “best” fiction…

Best Literary Series

How much do we love the Tattered Cover? We don’t have enough time to count the ways. And now this Denver institution has given us yet another reason to give thanks. Not content with bringing in an impressive lineup of national authors for readings and signings on an almost-daily (and…

Best Ring Leader

As part of the Denver’s Public Library’s Special Readings Project, children’s librarian Heath Rezabek held a birthday party last fall for Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, two of the heroes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterful books on Middle Earth, followed by a ten-week reading of The Fellowship of the Ring, book one…

Best Place to See Big-Budget, Big-Picture Flicks

When an epic like The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring comes to town, a typical suburban-style multiplex simply won’t do. Most movie buffs are going to want a wide screen with a booming sound system in order to appreciate Gandalf in all his wizardly splendor. In…

Best News for Moviegoers

Featuring six screens and a policy of booking foreign, independent and classic films 365 days a year, the new Starz FilmCenter in the old Tivoli Theaters on the Auraria campus represents a major advance in Denver’s cultural life. Operated by the Denver Film Society, which produces the Denver International Film…

Best Campus Flicks

Since 1941, cinephiles have been showing classics and contemporary art films on the Boulder campus, and the schedule in Muenzinger Auditorium this spring is as strong as ever, ranging from Takashi Miike’s Audition, which addresses marriage and sexuality in contemporary Japan, to Together, a smart ensemble comedy that won four…

Best Cheap Features

For those who missed the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There the first time around or who feel the urge to watch Mulholland Drive again on the big screen to try and figure out what the hell happened and sort out who all those women really are, Tiffany Plaza…

Best Spanish-Language Cinema

Let’s go to the cine! These days in Colorado, you can rent lots of movies with Spanish subtitles or voice-overs. But finding a Spanish-language movie theater is rare. In Aurora, though, you need look no further than the King Soopers shopping center at 6th and Peoria, where Cinema Latino offers…

Best Movie Theater for Comfort

It was at a Harry Potter screening that we began to feel the magic: The seats at the Westminster Promenade 24 seemed to enhance the viewing of the sorcery-soaked tale. Maybe it was the seat backs, which created a feeling of privacy — a nice trick in a room filled…

Best Movie Theater for Food

Operators of the Mayan Theatre have long known that the art house crowd likes specialty snacks, something beyond the realm of a crusty Milk Dud. But those who think the Mayan has grown stale should sink their teeth into some of these recent additions: an expanding collection of Ben &…

Best Drive-In Movie Theater

There aren’t many drive-ins left in the Denver area, but judging from the lines that snake out from the entrance to the Cinderella Twin on weekend nights during the summer, there’s still plenty of demand. This south metro area drive-in boasts two screens, each showing a double feature — PG…

Best Drive-In for Summer-School Students

It’s too bad that most drive-ins are only open in the summer; otherwise, they’d be the perfect year-round cheap date for the starving — and horny — college student. As it is, only students attending Colorado State University’s summer session get to make out at the Holiday Twin Drive-in. Although…

Best Drive-In With Accommodations

These are rooms with a view — of the motel’s giant outdoor movie screen. The sound is piped into your room, and you can watch the show from the comfort of your own bed through huge picture windows. Don’t get the wrong idea, though: The Star shows only G, PG…

Best Drive-In Movie Web Site

Colorado’s Drive-In Theater Guide, www.carload.com, lists features and showtimes for all twelve of the state’s active drive-ins, plus drive-in news and links to plenty of other drive-in-related sites. It hasn’t been updated since the end of August, but Web master Michael Kilgore plans to start up his labor of love…

Best Art Films

Film is an art form, one that Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art recognizes with Reel Love. Curated by Denver Art Museum film curator Tom Delapa, the current series traces the history of avant-garde filmmaking in this country…

Best Big Museum Exhibit (Since March 2001)

The reputation of late New York artist Alice Neel has been on the rise for decades, and her work became especially important to expressionists and to women artists beginning in the 1970s. It was then that Dianne Vanderlip, living in Philadelphia, organized the first-ever retrospective of Neel’s career. In so…

Best Museum Show — Solo

Letters of the alphabet — painted ones, wooden ones, mirrored ones — made up a total environment for Between the Lines: Word Works by Roland Bernier at the Denver Art Museum. They climbed the walls and were stacked on pedestals covering the floor. Some were arranged into short words, though…

Best Museum Show — Group

When the well-known and highly regarded Cydney Payton took the helm of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year, the art world held its breadth and waited for the unveiling of one of her signature shows. The wait ended with 5 Abstract, a look at five of the state’s most…