Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
There was a moment in Chess that undid me completely. It occurred when the heroine, Florence, met the man she believed to be her father — the father she had last seen in 1956 when, as a terrified little girl, she’d been torn from his arms by the Hungarian revolution…
The death penalty is an obscenity in itself, and the ways in which it’s applied are equally vile: the endless waiting on death row, where prisoners can sometimes see fellow inmates led to slaughter or hear the readying of the death equipment; the capriciousness of the appeals process; the countdown…
After Ashley. We first meet Ashley while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to reveal far more than Justin wants to know about her relationship with his…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
BTK Killer (Lions Gate) Chubby Hubby Workout (On Air Video) Dinosaurs: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Disney) The Family Stone (Fox) Flight 93: The Movie (UAV) Jargo (Picture This!) King of Thieves (Picture This!) Last Holiday (Paramount) Lie With Me (Lance) Life in the Undergrowth (BBC) Misaki Chronicles: Volume…
The biggest innovation videogaming saw in the past decade or so was the invention of the “sandbox”: Programmers create settings and consequences, but give you, the user, free license to do with them what you want. Grand Theft Auto is certainly the best-known of these games. The carjackings, the hookers,…
No one’s done more for the green pepper than the great photographer Edward Weston, whose shapely black-and-white capsicums sport more curves than his nudes when placed side by side for scrutiny. Ditto for the shells and nearly everything else the man ever shot: Weston was a master of light, shadow…
I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now… — Wilfred Owen Not even the dead will sleep tonight at…
Baby clothes in cardboard boxes, old coffee mugs stacked like Jenga towers, VCRs with Animal House stuck in the player and 25-cent price tags as far as the eye can see. It’s garage-sale season. And what’s better than browsing through other people’s junk? Getting nicely toasted while browsing through other…
Last year, Stephanie Beacher read Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel The Red Tent. The book chronicles the lives of the Old Testament figure Dinah and her four mothers, the wives of Jacob. Beacher was inspired by the tale: “Some of are sisters, and there’s all kinds of jealousy and things going…
Word of mouth, grassroots cooperation and a triple-espresso burst of communal energy are all it’s taken to blast Denver’s Scattered Arts Collective into the stratosphere. What began last summer as a brainstorm between a musician and a poet has blossomed into a series of multi-disciplinary art parties so popular that…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
The impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes — not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically ask: compared to what? Very well. Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
If you’re a regular movie-goer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
The Darwinian theory that shlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Having people from both inside and outside the art world come to me and plug a show is a standard feature of my life as an art critic. What’s funny about it, though, is how many of them think they’re doing me a favor. You see, in their fantasies about…
The Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969) has stumbled on a niche in the art market: featuring the work of well-known Colorado artists from yesteryear. Last month it was Ruth Todd, who is in her nineties, and now it’s Mel Strawn, who’s quite a bit younger. He’s in…
