Now Playing: The Week’s Theater Options

Ambition Facing West. Anthony Clarvoe’s Ambition Facing West is ostensibly about immigration, since it deals with three generations of an immigrant family — their lives, identities and ambitions in the mythical trek west for safety, opportunity and freedom, however defined. But Clarvoe goes deeper than this. His play isn’t a…

Now Showing: The Week’s Art Options

Far North & Outer Space. Far North & Outer Space, now at Goodwin Fine Art, features new work by Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono, both of whom create contemporary paintings based obliquely on views of the landscape. Many of the Careys are snow scenes and were inspired by a National…

John Wick Is Wicked Good

Dog lovers and fans of the beyond-understated charisma of Keanu Reeves have a tough choice when it comes to John Wick. Those who count themselves among the former should know that the Cutest Beagle EVER gets offed — off-screen, but still — in the first twenty minutes. That’s not my…

Horns Lets Radcliffe Be Bad, but Not in a Good Way

Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart, Merrin (Juno Temple), has been murdered underneath the…

Well Aged

You’re never too old to have style: That’s the message in Lithuanian-born filmmaker Lina Plioplyte’s documentary Advanced Style, screening tonight at the Sie FilmCenter as part of the Denver Film Society’s Women+Film series. Plioplyte, who financed the film through crowdfunding, will appear via Skype at the event to discuss the…

Queer Cheer

Kate Bornstein is a lot of things: activist, artist, writer, actor, playwright and gender theorist. But she’s also human, and tonight’s screening of Kate Bornstein Is a Queer & Pleasant Danger gets that point across. Not so much a documentary as a contemporary day-in-the-life tale with biographical elements woven throughout,…

Creepy Crawlers

If the only thing that really scares you about Halloween is figuring out where to spend your precious partying time, put your anxieties to rest. With Nightmare on LoDo Street, you don’t have to choose. “A pub crawl gives you the ultimate experience on this night — a variety of…

Getting Freaky

Fabulous costumes and makeup are a part of everyday life for drag queens. But when Halloween rolls around, it’s time to kick it up a notch. This year, Tracks Night Club is mashing up Halloween with its monthly Drag Nation show to bring you an all-out freak show. The club…

Spooky Samba

The Mercury Cafe does Halloween right every year — and for 2014, it’s throwing a little bit of samba flavor in with the usual favorites. “On Halloween, we invite our beloved dead to come feast with us and dance,” explains owner Marilyn Megenity. “Throughout the entire building, that’s what we’ll…

Vampire Weekend

It’s been seven years since Boulder’s Frequent Flyers aerial dance troupe put on its sophisticated, Halloween-friendly show Theatre of the Vampires, partly because it’s so costly to stage. “The production qualities are high, and it’s expensive for a reason — it’s the real deal,” notes Frequent Flyers founder Nancy Smith…

Bug-Ugly

Few Halloween club-night promoters meld partying with the arts more seamlessly than the Fantastic Hosts, a private local group for young professionals that opens some of its events to the public. Tonight’s Fantastic Ugly Bug Ball is the group’s spooktastic love letter to the fun-loving, diverse and artsy crowds of…

Dead On

It’s not uncommon to see throngs of people, faces painted and food in hand, parading into cemeteries on November 1 and 2. Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a two-day holiday that originated in Mexico, honors the dead through festivals and celebrations. It is believed that the dead…

It’s a Zoo Out There

Fans of the annual Denver Gorilla Run might notice that the event has migrated this year from its longtime home in lower downtown to City Park. “Runners will see a lot more natural vegetation,” notes Frank Keesling, president of the Mountain Gorilla Conservation Fund, the beneficiary of the event. “It’s…

Running Amok

Nearly every adult in America read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in middle school and has some memory of the novel’s nonstop, gut-wrenching intensity. Just imagine roping in all of the book’s politics and violence on the compact stage-in-the-round at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Space Theatre. That’s the…

Medium Well

Theresa Caputo is not your run-of-the-mill TV psychic or a one-dimensional caricature. Rather, she’s full of charm — something that the clairvoyant shows off perfectly in TLC’s brilliant Long Island Medium, a show that is just as much about Caputo’s everyday life as a wife and mother as it is…

Future Imperfect

Sci-fi author William Gibson has a reputation as a prognosticator of the future. His debut novel Neuromancer portrayed the Internet’s takeover of everyday life a decade and a half before it happened, establishing the gritty cyberpunk genre and influencing creators from Billy Idol to the Wachowskis. When it comes to…

TV Land

Decades ago, a golden era of TV horror hosts flourished. Every UHF channel with access to a hammy local actor and a box full of old, cheap monster movies would put the two together to fill those late-night hours. Those days are long gone, but the men of the Werewolf…

One Polish, With Everything

The University of Colorado’s International Film Series is mining the series Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema on Wednesday nights this fall, and this evening’s screening of Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1972 flick The Illumination fits right into Polish film’s experimental mold. Outwardly the story of a physics student waylaid in…

Catch a Buzz

While a tense Denver Center Theatre Company stage adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies goes on around the corner at the Space Theatre, Off-Center@The Jones will be making a delightful mockery of it, beginning with tonight’s 8 p.m. premiere of >Lord of the Butterflies, a musical parody featuring…

Life Time Movie

There aren’t many love stories as beautiful and strange as Harold and Maude, and when the stage adaptation of the classic film opens tonight, you’ll find its unique wonder intact. Not that there aren’t some obstacles to staging the tale of a love affair between a septuagenarian with a zest…