The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth. In his first original screenplay written directly for the screen, novelist Cormac McCarthy takes a holiday from the apocalyptic portentousness of his No Country for Old Men and…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
For those of us who don’t live in the immigrant world and interact with it only rarely and in routinized ways, the realities of immigrant life are hazy. Now and then a news story knifes through the haze: hundreds of workers deported seven years ago after raids at meat-packing plants…
In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never fully defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore on screen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the…
Every October, the Mercury Cafe’s Allied Witches performance troupe picks a different social theme and creates a narrative around it — and the group never has to look too far to find something scary to riff on. “We always try to give voice to the voiceless and the oppressed and…
The original Halloween, from 1978, was a history-making movie for several reasons: It introduced the slasher-film craze of the ’80s; it launched Jamie Lee Curtis’s career; and it showed that indie horror movies could see serious box-office success. Tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the film will screen along with…
The annual Halloween Boo-lesque Show, which opens during the spooky season at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, is one of the venue’s most popular shows, for performers and audiences alike. “A lot of people say it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before,” notes Naughty Pierre, the burlesque emcee at Lannie’s, “and because it’s…
Gory, gross and over the top, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator isn’t just an all-time classic of the horror genre; it’s also a showcase for what can be achieved with practical effects. Full of headless freaks, attacking intestines and splattery kills, it’s a time capsule of the pre-digital filmmaking era. That alone…
The Molly Brown House Museum has been all dressed up for the annual Halloween scary-story extravaganza, Victorian Horrors, for a few weeks now — and so director Andrea Malcomb thought it just made sense to keep that spirit alive for this year’s Night at the Museums offering, an All Souls’…
For the uninitiated, Baby Hair — happening tonight at Mutiny Information Cafe — is a place for eccentrics and misfits, a gathering that began last year as a monthly open mic and celebrated a safe space for the queer community to share poetry, live music, short films, diary entries and…
The hosts of Radiolab, the nationally syndicated WNYC public-radio show turned podcast, specialize in weaving anecdotal stories and science into documentaries rich with music and sound. In fact, by delving into profound curiosity and the human experience, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, who can be heard on 450 NPR stations,…
Last June 25, Texas state senator Wendy Davis made history when she filibustered for ten hours in an attempt to prevent a law from passing that would severely restrict abortion in Texas. Although the bill did become law, Davis prevented the vote from taking place that night, and her efforts…
From Trekkies to furries, just about every fan group has its own convention in Denver. Now we can add bronies to that diverse group, with the first-ever Running of the Leaves Con. Not familiar with this new star in the ever-growing constellation of fandom? Let the con’s head of cosplay…
According to Pirate gallery founder Phil Bender’s records, it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the co-op’s annual Day of the Dead Show and Celebration, which, in its earliest incarnations, was really the only DOD game in town. In the present, such art-driven celebrations have spread from community stalwarts like CHAC and…
When Phamaly, Denver’s theater company for actors with disabilities, puts on a formal production, it’s all business from start to finish, usually to rave reviews. But once a year, Phamaly stalwarts get to cut loose a little while performing material they’ve written and developed themselves for the comedy-sketch show Vox…
Steeped in controversy, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard is author Stephen Jimenez’s examination of the 1998 murder from a new angle — one that views the killing as a drug-related crime rather than the hate crime it is commonly considered to have been…
A shorthand history of American music wouldn’t be complete without mention of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where a white sharecropper’s son, Rick Hall, pumped the spirit of the South into several decades’ worth of rock and soul hits alike. Using a stable of local session musicians, Hall produced…
The 40 West Arts District invites you to “get your galactic groove on” with its sci-fi-themed Fall Arts Harvest Exhibition, opening today in Lakewood. The intergalactic display will showcase artists who are interpreting space travel and scientific innovation through paintings, glass art, sculpture, photography and digital art. “We have scientists…
Artist Alicia Bailey spent time with her great-aunt Ruth Wheeler — an educator and naturalist — before the elder relative died and left behind a trove of found artifacts, photos, letters and specimens from nature that Bailey had naturally gravitated toward as she got to know Wheeler more intimately. “She…
