The inherently conservative quality of Christmas entertainment — The Nutcracker and its ilk — has always been, well, an indelibly hard nut to crack. It takes something as inimitably elegant as the silky touch of a Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn arrangement to ever make such fare swing more than your average…
When potter Bob Smith realized a few years ago that he was in his 25th year “of being a clay guy” in Colorado, it also occurred to him that he wasn’t alone. But he realized, too, that there were other craftspeople in the state who hadn’t made it to the…
Since 1995, the Denver Art Museum’s handsome and spacious Stanton galleries have mostly been at the disposal of the Modern and Contemporary Art department, and over the years, department curator Dianne Vanderlip and her colleagues have used these rooms, located just off the elevator lobby on the first floor, to…
Most of the time we expect to see historic Colorado art at Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art (311 Detroit Street, 303-321-4786), but the gallery has also regularly shown contemporary art. Right now, for example, Schlosser is presenting Bernice Strawn, a show of recent sculptures by this well-known Colorado artist. Schlosser has…
About ten minutes after Stop Kiss begins, we learn that its two main characters, a pair of young women oblivious to their surroundings at the moment their mouths met in romantic bliss, were violently attacked while hanging out in a Greenwich Village park during the wee hours of the morning…
It’s hard to believe that what happens in Miracle on 34th Street bears any resemblance to everyday life. But as the Nomad Theatre’s entertaining revival demonstrates, the story has the ability to awaken ideals long ago beaten into a coma by megadoses of hard reality. Of course, those who attend…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s okay to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who’ve not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it, is…
The subjects of Mark Singer’s extraordinary documentary Dark Days were once the stuff of urban myth — the homeless “mole people” said to inhabit dank railroad tunnels below the streets of Manhattan, eking out subsistence in the face of scurrying vermin, disease and drug addiction. As it turns out, they…
When assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), you’re tempted to seek corresponding characters from popular movies in order to illustrate just how average this story is. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed from a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
With luck, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer/director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will inspire interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but time isn’t on its side. While this is a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely than most American…
Looking for Christmas entertainment that’s off the beaten path? Nancy Cranbourne and Patti Dobrowolski, last seen together in these parts at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Theater in their hit show 2 Women Avoiding Involuntary Hospitalization, have been coerced into a holiday followup at BMoCA, based on the same…
Oral history plays a major role in the magic created year in and year out by Denver’s Su Teatro ensemble, whose early acts of Chicano guerrilla theater, performed on the streets during grape boycott demonstrations years ago, have metamorphosed into fully staged productions. And so it goes with the group’s…
The free-for-all campaign to erase the recent history of Denver’s architecture, endorsed and enabled by Mayor Wellington Webb’s administration, continues unabated. And it’s amazing how many of the losses are associated with the Colorado Convention Center. The latest heartbreaking chapter came one step closer to ending a couple of weeks…
Ron Judish Fine Arts (1617 Wazee Street, 303-571-5556) is currently presenting a trio of superb solo shows. In the grand front room is Keith Milow: drawings, which features recent works by the world-famous Anglo-American artist. Milow uses steel and copper that have been chemically oxidized so that the steel is…
Its title is a clever play on Tantalus, the high-priced Greek epic that effectively displaced the Denver Center’s annual presentation of A Christmas Carol, but theatreMEDINA’s Santaless: The Twelve Plays of Christmas proves to be a collection of aimless skits worth considerably less than its $20 admission. Haphazardly constructed and…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her…
About halfway through the mega-budget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster-movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2 in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of…
Day 1: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
Fascinating and engrossing on every level, the beautifully constructed Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books sitting untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses…
Jake Brady and Wiley Deluce met in a bar in Alma in the 1880s and became fast friends. In fact, they became partners — and not in the “Hold it right there, partner” sense. The cowboy protagonists in part-time South Park resident Dave Brown’s Golden Feather Series of gay westerns,…
Some people are power shoppers. They’re the palm pilot-brains with impeccable budgeting skills and the remarkable ability to remember which store has the lowest price on which item. The most irritating thing about them is this: They’ve finished all their holiday shopping for the year and are preparing their lists…
