Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man such a gift. In telling the tale of Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American balladeer from Detroit who cut a…
It’s a hard world to be different in,” says Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) to her Pinterest/vision-board child Timothy (CJ Adams) while trying to explain why he must cover up the leaves that sprout on his legs. “Lots of people hate anything that’s different.” That hammer-to-nail, nutshelled life lesson is one…
Children of war suffer in myriad ways. They witness and sometimes experience violence, suffer hunger and disruption, see their parents helpless and unable to protect them from vast, frightening and incomprehensible forces. Displaced children are a predictable product of conflict. Even for those left physically unhurt, the losses are incalculable…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
In terms of looks, charisma, and talent, Rashida Jones should have been a star a long time ago. But in terms of what she’s ready to offer Hollywood (and what Hollywood finally might be ready to let her accomplish), her belated ascent seems well-timed. Bittersweet breakup comedy Celeste and Jesse…
A seasoned DJ, producer and live performer, Berlin-by-way-of-Vancouver’s Todd Shillington — aka Konrad Black — has roots in drum-and-bass and hip-hop, but he’s best known today as one of the founders (with Mathew Jonson, Graham Boothby and Jesse Fisk) of the international techno and house label Wagon Repair. Early in…
The music of DJ/producer Steve Smooth is a bit like his name — kind of cheesy, but in a way that can’t help but make you smile. His pumping, high-energy tracks are short on subtlety and long on slick production and relentless thump. It’s a bit predictable and sounds enough…
A mixed bag of local artists fall into the “underground” category these days — some are lowbrow; some are graffiti or tattoo artists; still others have found a way straddle the low- and highbrow worlds. But many of them have one thing in common: They got a leg up in…
There will be no white-hat/black-hat rivalry when the Denver police and Denver fire departments meet tonight in a friendly Battle of the Badges charity soccer match at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. As Denver spokeswoman Niambi Nicholes notes, “For them, it’s the bragging rights.” After all, the teams will be facing…
This year’s Wheat Ridge Carnation Festival, the 43rd annual celebration of Colorado’s carnation industry, will be the biggest and best yet, organizers promise. Two nights of fireworks, a chili cook-off, carnival rides and a parade are some of the favorites returning to the festival, which has attracted thousands of fans…
The Emerging Filmmakers Project at the Bug Theatre, one of our first MasterMind winners, has been spotlighting the work of local filmmakers for ten years now. But even so, says Eileen Agosta, program director for Colorado Independent Women of Film, “I don’t know that a lot of people outside the…
Five years ago, Denver director Terry Dodd staged The Hot L Baltimore in the most perfect of locations: the lobby of the aged Barth Hotel, the LoDo hotel-turned-assisted-living-residence where the intimate production raised funds for Senior Housing Options. It was a play about a run-down old hotel, staged in a…
Just because there are no good beaches in Denver doesn’t mean there are no good beach parties. Thanks to Tiki Fink Theatre, tonight you can enjoy the beach-party wonder that is The Beach Girls and the Monster, a 1965 cornball classic involving a mutant fish monster, a scientist who quits…
Step back in time — and maybe a bit into the future, too — at the Time Traveller’s Circus, a three-day festival at the one-and-only Happy Ass Ranch, where you’ll find fire eaters and fortune tellers, models and magicians, the Vagabond Misfits and a variety of bands, clowns and juggling…
Sweet! The 44th annual Palisade Peach Festival starts today on the Western Slope, with four days of just-peachy fun planned, every-thing from peach-eating contests to the Pedal-Paddle-Pedal bike-and-kayak race to Feast in the Field, gourmet dinners on Friday and Saturday nights prepared by Colorado chefs in the middle of the…
In addition to being a sculptor, Denver artist Laura Phelps Rogers has spent many years dealing antiques — something she says “brings a historic aesthetic to my contemporary sculpture. It’s all documentation — me remembering things that have come and gone. All of my work is memory-based, layered in a…
If you’re Jewish, the coming high holidays are nothing to joke about. “Around this time, a lot of Jews enter a period of preparing for them,” says Georgina Kolber of the Mizel Museum. “It’s an intense time for a lot of people; it’s when they set their intentions for the…
Were there any surprises among the 2012 Colorado Book Awards winners? “I thought the judges went outside the box a little this year,” says Christine Goff of Colorado’s Center for the Book, which coordinates the contest. “Several of the nominees were self-published books, and there were several submitted as e-books,…
Fast-forwarding Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century Italian comedy La Mandragola (the Mandrake), into La Dolce Vita-era Naples actually makes a lot of sense; if you ask Spark Theater’s Michael Emmitt, the ’60s time period of his Machiavellian update, The Love Potion, not only offers an accurate mirror of humanist upheaval in Italy at…
Pull out the lycra and spandex! The USA Pro Challenge has returned to Colorado for its second year. “Last year, we estimated over a million spectators,” reveals Shawn Hunter, CEO of the Pro Challenge, “and I’d like to think that number will grow.” Through seven stages of racing, with elevations…
Director Dave Ortolano has high hopes for this year’s Boulder International Fringe Festival. By way of a glorious coming together of fate and talent, he says, it’s turning out to be showplace for fest favorites of the past, and that’s a very good thing. “This year, we have about six…
The plot of Spring Awakening, according to Keith Rabin Jr., artistic director at Ignite Theatre, stems from one big question: “What happens when parents do not explain sex to their kids?” Specifically, what happens to Wendla, a young, inquisitive girl struggling to under-stand a changing body? And what happens to…
