The 23rd Denver International Film Festival leaves the gate Thursday with an opening-night screening at the Buell Theatre of David Mamet’s State and Main. How appropriate. The playwright/filmmaker’s latest effort is a comedy about the effects of a film crew’s visit on a quiet Vermont village; it stars Alec Baldwin,…
Over the last century, hundreds of dedicated, masterful artists have worked in Colorado. But while a score of them have achieved genuine international recognition — on the level of Vance Kirkland, for example — only a handful made art history. There’s Boardman Robinson, the social realist painter who worked in…
Is That Jazz? is a real oddball of a show, a collection of bizarre, yet somehow quaint, paintings, watercolors and a construction by Dallas artist David McCullough. The pieces are dense, opaque and thick — words that also describe the tangle of theoretical concepts that underlie his work. Like Jung,…
Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…
The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Early in the stunning new film by Spanish director Carlos Saura, the great nineteenth-century painter Francisco de Goya wakes from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, the 82-year-old protagonist suddenly finds himself…
When Longmont painter Rick Stoner starts snapping photos in an alley, some people get suspicious. They wonder if he’s an FBI agent, or a surveyor for the city setting them up for a property-tax hike. They wonder if he’s a plain old snoop. But nothing could be further from the…
Beer geeks know him as the world’s leading author of beer-related prose, the Bard of Beer Journalism. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, there are less-knowing types who still mistake him for the King of Crotch-Grabbing Pop, the gloved wonder of cosmetic surgery. Jackson, whose numerous tomes serve as bibles for beer-…
Located within the Jewish Community Center, the Singer Gallery’s association with the Jewish community might create the assumption that it explores only Jewish themes in art. But for a long time, Singer has presented shows that, while typically of interest to the Jewish community, have not, strictly speaking, been Jewish…
The Rocky Mountain Womens Institute has gone down a rocky road in recent months, and its this years pair of RMWI Fine Art Associates, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Dania Pettus, whove blazed the trail. It began when the two artists notified the RMWI that the pieces they planned to create…
Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…
Mabel Tidings Bigelow has lived most of her ninety years contemplating her choices in life. The feisty Massachusetts salt aspired at an early age to be the first woman to swim the English Channel in the direction opposite to the one taken by Channel pioneer Gertrude Ederle (who swam the…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
Every now and then, a movie comes along that makes you feel as though you’ve fallen face-first into a stale cat box filled with grouchy baby asps. Come to think of it, this seems to happen, oh, one to three times a week, especially when the movie is about “real…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home-video camera, we have been afforded several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to the networks for our…
There are those who bemoan Colorado’s landlocked condition and regard the Rockies as some kind of consolation prize for our lack of a Hamptons or a Jersey shore. But there are also those much more enlightened folks who realize that east of Denver, the high plains roll out with endless…
Art’s truest underground — skateboard art — is part of a thriving industry that nobody’s ever heard of. But now it’s the subject of an exhibition illuminating a genre that rarely even sees the light of day, let alone a mass following. Or so it would seem. The result of…
Jerry Kunkel’s name is well known in these parts: He’s been on the art faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder for more than thirty years, and for a while in the 1970s, he fronted the punk band Joey Vane and the Scissors. But though many people have heard…
Emerging artist Colin Livingston has put together a moving show made up of paintings and mixed-media pieces that depict his mother. Mom, currently at the Apart Modern Gallery, takes up a difficult topic, however: Livingston’s mother committed suicide when he was in the fifth grade. The artist addresses this deeply…
