November is giving way to December, which means we’re heading right into holiday festivals. Prepare yourself by loading up on fun: This week you can hear music, listen to comedians and get fed — all for free. Check the Westword calendar for more to do. Ratio Sessions: together PANGEA Ratio…
Terry Dodd, a fixture on Denver’s theater scene for decades, passed away in October; he will be remembered with a celebration of his life at 6 p.m. Monday, November 29, at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Juliet Wittman, Westword’s longtime theater critic, not only wrote about his…
Throughout November 2016, there are plenty of options for leisurely and off-the-wall gift shopping in Denver that won’t break your budget — or your brain.
We found the street-style look of the month on a red carpet rather than asphalt, when actress Emma Stone arrived at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for opening night of the 39th annual Denver Film Festival. The romantic musical-comedy La La Land made its Denver premiere that night, and the…
The Thanksgiving feast is over, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had this weekend, the real kick-off to the holiday season. Leave your relatives at home or bring them along for laughs, films and other frivolity. Here are our ten favorite events around town; find more on the…
Tired of avoiding talking about politics with your family? You’re in luck: There are plenty of good movies out this weekend, from a solid feel-good flick from Disney, a sci-fi thriller about the way we communicate and a spy movie that feels fresh.
Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
Oh man, are we in a backlash on liberal, PC culture right now. I mean, if you can call electing the KKK’s and Nazi party’s greatest white hope to the highest office in the world a backlash. I can’t even count how many people — strangers, family, trolls — have…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating “the way of the future” ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty’s long-in-the-making Rules Don’t Apply isn’t nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all…
Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to. It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath…
As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of…
Art doesn’t simply reflect reality – it shapes reality. Here are the 25 best murals of 2016 in Colorado.
I was recently having brunch with my family. It was a normal meal, like thousands of meals I’d had in public before. The server came to the table to take our drink order, and the exchange with this man in an apron went something like this: Server: And what can I…
So you’re headed to Denver International Airport, along with about ten million other people. If you’re lucky, the wait at security (currently 27 minutes at the south checkpoint) could be the shortest wait you encounter; bad weather in other parts of the country may snarl schedules. Fortunately, there’s more to…
While the Arvada Center production of I’ll Be Home for Christmas is a lump of coal in the holiday-show stocking (read the review of I’ll Be Home here), other offerings around town look much more promising. Here are four to explore: 1. A Christmas Carol is essentially the same production…
About a year ago, Colorado’s Doug Kacena came up with a provocative idea for an exhibit: He would paint over other artists’ paintings employing his own style, while those other artists painted over his works in their own respective styles. It was an unusual move, even if there were art-historical…
Getting the turkey on the table is the least of your challenges this week: You also need to keep your relatives entertained on a very long weekend. If you’re hoping to avoid the nervous breakdown that family time often brings, we recommend getting out of the house and enjoying a…
Usually a show having its world premiere in Denver is something to celebrate, but every now and then you wonder if you’re witnessing a premiere only because no other theater in the country wanted to stage the thing. I’ll Be Home for Christmas, a musical written by Kenn McLaughlin with…
We’ve got plenty of Thanksgiving Day-related happenings, including some do-goodery and a funky dance party, and loads to do after Turkey Day for you and yours.
When you call cows, you say co’boss. And when you call sheep, you say co’da. This information is relayed to us in the first few minutes of Peter and the Farm by Peter Dunning, who’s lived and worked on 187 acres near Brattleboro, Vermont for the lion’s share of his…
Like the movie series that inspired it, Star Wars and the Power of Costume is proving a big hit at the Denver Art Museum, with out-of-this-world attendance figures. But the exhibit is about more than star power; it “basically is looking at form and function,” says Saul Sopoci Drake, exhibitions…
