Casablanca: Here’s looking at you in Denver this week

Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be complete without at least one showing of Casablanca, one of the greatest love stories of all time. But Bogart and Bergman will meet up several times over the next week on screens across the city, at evenings featuring everything from the movie and a martini to…

Get Immortalized this weekend at Brushstrokes

Brushstrokes Studio-Gallery is filling up with a lot of love this month. Larger-than-life puppies and hand-painted Valentine’s Day gifts will be taking over the space located in the heart of South Broadway’s Antique Row. The lovely lineup starts with tonight’s opening reception for mural and portrait artist Patrick McGregor. While…

Six sick ways to play in “storm of the century” powder this weekend

Last week’s storms brought the deepest 24- and 48-hour snowfall totals since the 2000-2001 season, prompting Vail Resorts’ marketing team to dub it the “storm of the century.” We can’t argue with that, especially since the snow’s been falling pretty much ever since, punctuated with bluebird days perfect for making…

John Sinclair on the Beats, poetry and weed

Before John Sinclair founded the White Panthers, managed the MC5 and did time for giving an undercover cop two joints as a Christmas present, he read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a junior in high school — and he says his life started. Sinclair will be at the Mercury…

George Clooney spotlights unsung heroes in The Monuments Men

Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from thirteen nations who volunteered to protect cultural…

Building a better Lego Movie

Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996, when they housed the server for their new…

In Gloria, love is a many-splendored thing

Now that people are living so much longer, our self-invention can seemingly go on forever. The heroine of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s exuberant semi-comedy Gloria is right in the middle of the fifty-something version of that in-betweenness. We join her story already in progress, but get the idea pretty quickly:…

A real creak show, The Mousetrap is still comforting entertainment

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened at London’s New Ambassadors Theatre in 1952, moved to the St. Martin’s Theatre in 1974 and has continued its majestic trundle through theater history to become the longest-running show in the entire world. It’s like a lot of other English institutions — tea cozies, the…

RedLine’s Transit of Venus pays tribute to the Front Range Women

During his tenure at RedLine, former director P.J. D’Amico brought an interest in social activism to the programming there. A little over a year ago, he and then-deputy director (and now director) Louise Martorano decided that the 2014 schedule would be given over to exploring the role of women in…

Now Showing

Cross Currents. This ambitious show, put together by CVA creative director Cecily Cullen, showcases contemporary art by Native Americans from across the country. It is a followup to Currents, a show Cullen did at the old LoDo CVA in 2009 that was on the same theme and was equally intelligent…

Now Playing

Black Odyssey. Based on Homer’s epic, Black Odyssey tells the story of a soldier, Ulysses Lincoln, coming back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Like his namesake, he is forced to wander for many years before he can return home, encountering supernatural beings and many strange adventures along the…

Dress for Success

Under the Gunn and Project Runway stars Tim Gunn and Mondo Guerra are joining forces this year to host Goodwill’s annual Good Exchange Fashion Show and Clothing Swap, which features both upcycled clothing designs by the young designers of Goodwill’s youth programs and local celebrity models showing off secondhand finds…

Just for Kicks

When a blind assassin with a flying guillotine faces off against a one-armed boxer, there’s no doubt who’ll win: everyone who loves a great kung fu movie. Once you’ve seen Master of the Flying Guillotine, one of the greatest — and most influential — kung-fu flicks ever made, you, too,…

Working for Sex Workers

The 1969 Stonewall riots, which protested police brutality, are widely recognized as a historic moment in the gay-rights movement. But Melinda Chateauvert also identifies the riots as a cornerstone of the fight for sex workers’ rights. “This is a movement that we haven’t paid attention to, but we need to,”…

The Beat Goes On

“My life started when I read On the Road, by Jack Kerouac,” says John Sinclair, a poet, activist, former MC5 manager and White Panther Party founder. “It came out in September of 1957. I was a junior in high school. It set me on the correct path of life. I’ve…