Godzilla and five more kaiju I have loved

This week, Denver residents have a rare opportunity to see the genesis and current pinnacle of the kaiju genre with showings of both the original 1954 Japanese classic Godzilla (at the Sie FilmCenter) and the brand-new iteration (screening pretty much everywhere else movie tickets are sold). The original is better…

Now Showing

1959. Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is the host curator for Modern Masters at the Denver Art Museum, and he’s done a companion exhibit at his own stamping grounds called 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. (Special tickets allow visitors to see both.) The backstory for…

Now Playing

A Round-Heeled Woman. Jane Juska’s memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, an account of her search for no-strings-attached sex, was a brave gamble — as was Edge Theatre’s decision to produce the play based on the book. But Juska’s gamble paid off, and so…

The new Godzilla‘s special effects aren’t too shabby

Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla chest hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Toho Co. Ltd. extravaganza. In that…

Jon Favreau’s Chef is a foodie’s delight

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture what his own Swingers was to the ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef’s-knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…

Nothing in Stage Fright beats Meat Loaf

Nothing in Stage Fright, a horror-musical hybrid that plays like a sleepy, off-brand Troma movie, is as good as Meat Loaf. A walrus-mustachioed Loaf plays Roger McCall, the skeevy owner of Center Stage, a summer camp for young musical theater performers. To generate the ticket sales that will pay his…

Stripped bare, Venus in Fur isn’t that erotic…or interesting

The setting is the kind of rehearsal room every performer is familiar with: dusty and relatively bare, the windows grimy and patched over, an ancient rotating fan. Slap-bang in the middle, though, there’s a red velvet divan. Subtle shifts of light periodically change the feel of the place; it goes…

New work from Amy Metier fills the main space at Havu

The William Havu Gallery is one of only a handful of top-tier contemporary venues in Denver. Havu specializes in the work of advanced or mid-career artists, most of whom work in Colorado or the Southwest. Currently, Havu is presenting Amy Metier: Preconceived Notions, which is filled with modernist-derived abstractions by…

Cannes Report: Grace of Monaco at Least Has Clothes

Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule – maybe it should even be a written one – that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…

A Rom-Com of One’s Own

When first-time director Gillian Robespierre’s festival favorite Obvious Child makes its theatrical debut in June, it could herald the sweetest, funniest, most unassuming cinematic revolution in years. Starring former Saturday Night Live bit player Jenny Slate in a ravishing star turn, the romantic comedy quickly caught attention at Sundance for…

Screen Time

Downtown Denver will be ground zero this afternoon if you’re looking for something fun, free and totally unexpected to do: From 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., students from the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Arts & Media digital design program will put their learning to work for the two-hour Kinesthesia…

Storied Places

Nobody knows better than Tracy Weil, who’s been there from the start, how much the River North Art District has grown and changed in the past ten or so years. But most people who now come to RiNo to enjoy its bountiful galleries, restaurants, breweries and watering holes don’t know…

The Beautiful and the Bazaar

One reason Westword awarded last summer’s inaugural Valverde Bazaar the Best New Flea Market designation in our 2014 Best of Denver issue is the fact that it’s so hard to pin down, and that keeps us all on our toes. Like a labyrinth of earthly delights, the Valverde is a…

Belly Up

“A lot of people put belly dancers in the same category as strippers,” says Melissa Brandhorst of Shimmy Mob, a national organization that raises money for women’s and children’s shelters with flash-mob-style events. “But it really is an art form; it takes years of practice and muscle memory and dedication…

Feeling Your Oats

Sex later in life is a subject many people try not to think about, but retired English teacher Jane Juska opened up a whole discussion on the subject when she serendipitously placed this personal ad in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 — next March —…

Tough Choices

In 2009, Dr. George Tiller, one of only a handful of doctors in the country who performed late-term abortions, was fatally shot while at-tending church services in his home town of Wichita, Kansas. Tonight, Physicians for Human Rights Colorado is partnering with the Sie FilmCenter to present After Tiller, a…

Civil Service

When The Advocate published the 2008 article “Gay Is the New Black,” they “pissed off a lot of people because of this feeling that it was saying that the civil-rights movement is over and done, and now it’s the gay-rights movement that’s ascendant,” says Yoruba Richen, director of The New…

Sound Off

Evan Weissman’s Warm Cookies of the Revolution is going strong into its second year, as more Denverites find their way to his unique civic gatherings. Tonight’s GLBTQ Intergenerational Show and Tell Mix Tape will focus on the presentation of personal stories through favorite songs. An all-ages panel will share their…