A geek’s guide to the Starz Denver Film Festival

Do you like movies? Of course you do. What geek doesn’t? The good news is that for the next ten days the Starz Denver Film Fest, one of Denver’s premiere cultural events, is going to be bringing a lot of movies to town for you to watch. The less good…

Now Showing

Barbara Carpenter and Janice McDonald. In the east gallery at Spark, Barbara Carpenter has assembled a large group of small photos hung in clusters, salon-style, for Walking Miss Daisy: Photographs by Barbara Carpenter. The Miss Daisy of the title is Carpenter’s dog, and all of the photos have been taken…

Regional art and artists are showcased at Havu and David B. Smith

The reliable William Havu Gallery has hit a groove this fall by establishing a theme for a series of exhibits: regional subjects by regional artists. The season opener was Western Not Western, which featured varying interpretations of Western subjects. Next week, there’s a Jeff Aeling solo made up of neo-traditional…

Thor: The Dark World keeps the Marvel machine going

Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying titan with…

Matthew McConaughey gets physical in Dallas Buyers Club

Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained sixty pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds — he looked like a walking,…

Comic illusions abound in Rancho Mirage

For a while I try to figure out why I’m enjoying Rancho Mirage — currently having a rolling premiere at Curious Theatre Company and a couple of other companies nationally — so much. True, the dialogue is swift and clever — as Steven Dietz’s dialogue always is — and the…

Message from Malala

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who spoke up for education, was subsequently shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012. But she survived and went right back to fighting for her beliefs. Now living in Britain, Yousafzai has become a heroine and spokeswoman for women’s rights — at the…

Safe Is Sexy

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, the nonprofit Boulder Valley Women’s Health Clinic wanted to do something unexpected. So tonight at the Boulder Theater, the organization will present Condom Couture, a fashion show benefiting the clinic and its community work. And, as at any runway show, models will grace the catwalk…

A Bloody Shame

High school is hard. Between the hormones, the peer pressure and the homework, it’s a miracle anyone survives. Now throw some uncontrolled telekinesis into that teen angst, set the whole thing to music, and you’ve got Carrie: The Musical, the latest horror classic to make the transition to the stage…

Extra Ordinary

When Tran and Josh Wills started talking about closing Super Ordinary Gallery, which they’d been running out of their house, the Denver creative scene begged the couple to reconsider. “It worked, and we always had great turnouts and great support, but it was a little too much,” Tran recalls. But…

Blingtime in Paris

Denver once billed itself as “Paris on the Platte,” so the Paris Holiday Market is the perfect place to do some holiday shopping for the Denverites on your list. Although this is the market’s third year, it’s the first to be held in conjunction with the Denver Public Library’s Fresh…

Art and Soul

The real point of Denver Arts Week isn’t to invent ten days of cultural events out of thin air. Rather, it’s to shine a spotlight on what happens here all year long — if you know where to find it. Think of it as a definitive map of the local…

Got a Match?

A local legend-in-the-making will meet his hero in the ring tonight when Primos Hardcore and Wrestling presents Twist of Hate, a match between WWE superstar Matt Hardy and up-and-comer Rob Ryzin. In one of the biggest events to date for Primos, the two will face off in a contest that…

Fashion Forward

What started more than a half-decade ago as a collaboration between 303 magazine publisher AB Aharonian and local stylist Charlie Price has grown into a two-day, must-see scene: Denver Fashion Weekend Fall 2013, which features close to two dozen hair salons, boutiques and designers, including names like Mona Lucero, Garbarini…

Live and Get Live

The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art wants to stimulate you all weekend long with MediaLive 2013, an interactive audiovisual experience featuring ten artists with live-music accompaniment. “This four-day festival presents a variety of approaches, discusses the technology and underlying theoretical, formal and conceptual considerations, and offers opportunities to explore live…

It’s Out of This World!

Tonight’s Interactive Tour of the Universe — part of the new space series at Chautauqua — is bound to be an absolutely stellar evening of intergalactic education. “This is a presentation that Dr. Ka Chun Yu, the curator of space science at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, has…

Austin Power

In 1991, director Richard Linklater burst onto the scene with Slacker, a unique and vibrant film that announced him as a major talent. Now, more than twenty years after its debut, the film — set in Austin, Texas, over a 24-hour period — still stands as one of Linklater’s greatest,…