100 Colorado Creatives: Andy O’Leary

#48: Andy O’Leary Andy O’Leary, a Denverite since childhood, is a poet, a DJ at KUVO and a general man of the people. But music is his mistress. Ever since he was a kid in the ’60s whose brain was split open by the Beatles and then picked up a…

Ice Cube hosts a pair of good-looking member solos

One of the handsomest and best exhibition spaces in town is in an artist cooperative, of all places: the main space at Ice Cube Gallery. Upon entry, visitors are confronted by a large room, cut up by moveable walls and topped with a high ceiling, that’s ideal for displaying art…

Now Showing

Charles Bunnell. A pioneer abstractionist is the star of Charles Bunnell: Rocky Mountain Modern at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show was curated by Blake Milteer, the CSFAC’s museum director and curator of American art, who built it around the private collection of James and Virginia Moffett, who…

Adore‘s self-serious presentation hinders its trashy appeal

There’s something unsettling about Anne Fontaine’s Adore, and, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with the two middle-aged women who fall in love with each other’s teenage sons in the film. The cougars in question are Lil and Roz, best friends since childhood played with notable earnestness by Naomi Watts…

The emotional intricacy of Short Term 12 is nearly overwhelming

Like The Wire or Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s oeuvre, Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition and resonance. Easily one of the best…

Now Playing

50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…

Orange Is the New Black‘s Radical Critique of American Prisons

All manner of spoilers below. Nearly anyone with a grievance against America’s dysfunctional prison system can find a scene to illustrate their protest in the first season of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix’s women-behind-bars dramedy. Admittedly, the wonkiest or most disheartening issues, like prison privatization or endemic sexual assault,…

Five Great Summer Movies You Might Have Missed (And Can Still Catch!)

As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…

Mile High Hopes

Expectations for a Denver Broncos team haven’t been as high as they are this year since the days of the legendary John Elway/Terrell Davis duo: They have one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time in Peyton Manning; a passing offense that got even deadlier with the addition of Wes…

Getting Off the Street

Anthony Garcia lived in Globeville for 25 years before recently moving on, but as director of the Birdseed Collective, a grassroots group promoting neighborhood unity through the arts, he hasn’t left the community behind. And for the last three years, one of his favorite Globeville projects has been Street Kidz…

Tag, You’re It

Cities on both U.S. coasts have had graffiti jams for years, but local street artist and muralist Dread wanted something bigger for Denver’s writers and crews. So he helped create Colorado Crush, a celebration of the often unheralded artistic style; the daylong block party, which includes music, painters and merchants,…

Star Power

Local actor and theater educator Jose Antonio Mercado met Hollywood couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman the same way they met each other: acting in a production of The Berlin Circle in Los Angeles back in 2000. They all became fast friends — and in the case of Mullally and…

Two-Wheel Circus

For those not familiar with New Belgium Brewing’s annual touring Tour de Fat celebration, the sight of local bicyclists parading down 17th Avenue from City Park in an array of costumes both silly and inspired might seem a little peculiar. But that’s how it is at the Tour de Fat,…

Apocalyptic Mystery Tour

Hopping on Salon Romantik’s tour bus tonight will take you on a very different sightseeing adventure than you’d have on your typical tourist van or party bus. Fear & Prophets, the newest avant-garde performance from Control Group Productions — and the third in Salon Romantik’s series exploring romanticism — offers…

Radio Days

Andy O’Leary grew up on radio. As a kid, he holed up and listened to music and old-timey variety shows; now, as an adult, he’s translating his love of the theater of the mind to the stage. Inspired by Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, the host of KUVO’s Sunday-night…

Spirits of the West

“One of the great things about having thirty-plus distilleries in this state is that there’s something for everyone,” says Josh Mishell, co-organizer of the Colorado Distillers Festival. And with a couple dozen of those distilleries representing at the festival, attendees will be able to find spirits to their tastes. “I…