American Ninja Warrior returned to Denver this week to hold tryouts for the TV show. Challengers tackled an obstacle course set up in Civic Center Park in an attempt to prove they have what it takes to be the Ultimate American Ninja Warrior. Photographer Marissa Shevins was there to capture…
This summer’s Film on the Rocks schedule is out; as in past years, the festival will feature old favorites, newer films, local artists and more at Red Rocks. See also: World Football Film Festival kicks off in Denver in June…
Africa School Assistance Project, a Denver non-profit that builds primary and secondary schools in underserved areas of East Africa in partnership with local communities, will break ground next month on the first phase of a dormitory for girls at a secondary school in rural northern Tanzania. “If you really want…
Editor’s note: Our cover story this week, Alan Prendergast’s “Party in the Park,” looks at how Denver’s park rangers are gearing up for a busy summer season. In response, Westword writers are weighing in with appraisals of their own favorite Denver parks, starting with Prendergast’s tribute to City Park. City…
#82: Tobias Fike Nebraska native Tobias Fike, now working in Colorado after earning his MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder, isn’t tied down by a particular medium or discipline — or even a particular place. Instead, he manipulates concepts, makes sculpture and video, launches performances, collaborates and, with the…
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…
If you take a closer look, underneath layers of paint and decades of additions, there are gorgeous mid-century modern commercial structures along Colfax Avenue that have a story to tell. A sordid past is part of what makes the country’s longest main street fascinating to some, but for Bill Marino…
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…
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…
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…
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, 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If all of Cannes isn’t it love with Channing Tatum right now, it should be. During the photo-call for Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher on Monday afternoon Tatum — relaxed, affable, light on his feet despite being seriously built — turned toward the press and took a few photographs of the corps…
Cannes, on festival weekends, is wild: Every night is busy on the Croisette, the long boulevard that winds along the shore and past the Palais des Festivals, the large complex where most of the festival action — including screenings, premieres, and red-carpet walking — take place. But the crowds swell…
Let’s rewind twenty years, to the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson has been arrested for murder, the World Cup is in America and being ignored, and the biggest hits at the multiplex are Forrest Gump, The Lion King, True Lies and Speed. Notice anything odd about those movies? There’s not…
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…
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…
