3 things to do for free in Denver this week, July 1-4

Celebrate Independence Day this week by freeing yourself from any reliance on your wallet. Whether you want to catch a horror film featuring creepy children, watch fireworks or dance to soul tunes at a barbecue, you can do it all for free. For hundreds of other events this week, check…

GroundSwell Gallery unveils a new mural this weekend

Furthering its commitment to supporting local artists, GroundSwell Cannabis Boutique and Gallery recently commissioned a mural on the shop’s heavily trafficked block of Colfax Avenue. With help from the gallery’s DJ Mario Zoots, curators Rebecca Peebles and Danette Montoya connected with artist and sign painter Kevin Hennessy, who (along with…

Shoot rocks, watch Rock Jocks at Alamo Sunday

There’s no better way to celebrate a geek movie about shooting asteroids out of the sky than getting a bunch of geeks on stage to show off their skills doing that exact thing. No surprise, then, that the Alamo Drafthouse’s Action Pack team will be doing exactly that Sunday, Jun…

Twenty buddy cop movies worth seeing again

With Friday’s release of The Heat (Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy), another buddy cop movie joins a film library filled with explosions, oddball pairings and broad humor. While the genre’s been compacted into a cliche over the years (especially immediately following its heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s), and…

Mystery Science Theater 3000’s legacy of hilarity

Welcome to a new column called Geek Speak, in which we take on an aspect of geek culture each week. We geeks watch a lot of bad movies. It’s not like we have a choice, really. We like the kind of movies that we like, and the sad truth is…

Now Showing

David Mazza. It was only last summer that Randy Roberts, director of Z Art Department, shifted gears: Although he initially showcased the work of historic artists — that is, dead ones — Roberts has increasingly turned to contemporary artists who are still alive and kicking. Demonstrating this new direction is…

Now Playing

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cast for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first offering in this year’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, has many strengths. When did you last even notice who played First Fairy? Or Peter Quince? When the former is Nicole Bruce and the latter Greg West, you notice and…

Somm offers a taste of the wacky world of wine-lovers

A sommelier can incite intimidation, scorn or trust, depending on who’s drinking and who’s pouring. Rarely, at least in America, do we take full advantage of proximity to those nerds with corkscrews. Somm follows four young men training hard to be Master Sommeliers, of which there are only 200 worldwide…

White House Down‘s liberal vision is funny for all the wrong reasons

Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy — even if it doesn’t realize that itself — Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s…

A Hijacking turns modern piracy into a believable thriller

Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…