Why Fantasy Football Is Not Dungeons & Dragons for Jocks

Fall is here, which means football season is here, which means fantasy football is back! How’s your team? (Just kidding: No one who’s not in your league cares.) Sadly, it also means the tired, lazy comparisons between fantasy football and Dungeons & Dragons are back. Whether it’s a meme like…

Austrian Horror Flick Goodnight Mommy Has Promise — but Cheats

Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…

Moving to Another City Isn’t the Solution to Denver’s Growing Pains

Traffic in Denver sucks. If you drive along Speer Boulevard after 3 p.m. on any given day, you have to battle not only congestion, but new development construction that is apparently permitted to stop traffic whenever it pleases. Then there’s the nightmare known as Colorado Boulevard, a street where no…

Playbill: Three Front Range Dance Events September 24-27

Dance takes center stage — and even the silver screen — this week in Denver, with a performing-arts calendar that includes a stopover by Twyla Tharp’s golden-anniversary tour, a celebration of dance on film, and a fall premiere from Denver’s own Cleo Parker Robinson Dance. Twyla Tharp Dance: 50th Anniversary…

Art Review: Matt Scobey Presents Concrete Ideas at Leon Gallery

Matt Scobey has been part of the Denver scene for ten years, but he has never had a higher profile than he does right now. That’s partly because his “Talavera Bolsa,” a crumbling partial floor made of concrete tiles, was the only unalloyed success in last summer’s otherwise disappointing Vis-à-Vis…

Meet the Artists Behind the Street-Art Murals of Colorado Crush 2015

What a beautiful, aerosol-filled weekend! Colorado Crush was massive this year, taking over the RiNo arts district and adding fresh murals by acclaimed local and international artists. Jonathan Lamb of Like Minded Productions had helped locate the walls and sanction space for the artist lineup, which included Colorado Crush founder Robin…

Theater review: Love and Language Triumph in Outside Mullingar

John Patrick Shanley first visited his father’s birthplace in Ireland in 1993, and Outside Mullingar, which opened last year in New York, is a clear response to what he found there. We know this Ireland he depicts — rural, muddy and barren; we know of its isolated farms and the…

The Mayday Experiment: The Struggle Is Real

There are times – a lot of them – when I just don’t know how I’m going to go on. Things feel daunting. What I need to do to try to survive in New Denver and my new reality – adjuncting, juggling multiple jobs, scrambling with the ordinary day-to-day –…

CineLatino Co-founder Joanna Cintrón Picks Her Películas Favoritas

Given the rich Latino heritage that runs through Colorado, it’s surprising that a properly programmed and produced film festival celebrating all of our diverse hermanos y hermanas took so long to appear. It wasn’t until last year that the Denver Film Society produced the first CineLatino Film Festival — and…

Photos: Wenches and Scalawags at the Northglenn Pirate Fest

The Jolly Roger flew over E.B. Rains Park on Saturday for the inaugural Northglenn Pirate Fest, a local nod to Talk Like a Pirate Day that included live music and circus performances, a cardboard-boat regatta, and — what else? — a Talk Like a Pirate contest. Photographer Ken Hamblin was…

Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home Is What the Movies Are Made For

In the mid-twentieth century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…

Five Underappreciated Movies Made in Colorado

Colorado is photogenic, and proves it in more than a hundred films. It first posed for the camera in 1897, when James H. White and Frederick Blechynden shot short “actualities” such as Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys, and the kinetic Denver Fire Brigade, in which horse-drawn engines, careening and…

Literary Calendar: Five Events in Denver September 21-27

Poetry is big in Denver literary circles this week, as 100 Thousand Poets for Change takes over the city with a series of weekend events and the local slam community sends off its 2015 contender for the Individual World Poetry Slam. And then there’s also a side-trip to literary Iceland…

Photographer Evan Semón Captures Colorado’s Cycle Culture

You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. The wheels are turning for photographer Evan Semón. Cycle Culture Colorado: We BikeDenver,…

Theater Writer John Lahr Returns to Colorado With New Book

John Lahr wants us to see what’s behind the curtain. The eminent theater critic, who retired recently after covering the beat for the the New Yorker magazine for 21 years, produces the most probing, original and well-written work on performance, performers and the theater today. His most recent collection of profiles…

Gallery Sketches: Five New Shows in Denver for September 18-20

It’s a banner week for art in Denver, headlined by the September 18 opening of Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty at MCA Denver. But there’s so much more — layers and layers of it — as galleries and local artists celebrate image and process with challenging installations and variations of mixed media…