3 things to do for free in Denver this week, March 10-13

Rather than seethe with jealousy at Facebook friends who are paying big money to head to Austin for South By Southwest, you can stay in Denver and enjoy movies and panel discussions this week — for free! From a screening of the 1968 Romeo and Juliet to Uranium Drive-In to…

Local filmmakers unleash zombie doc Doc of the Dead at SXSW

The past ten years have made it apparent that there is no more room in hell, because everywhere you look, the dead are walking the earth. Zombies are a genuine pop-cultural phenomenon, starring in cable TV’s most popular show, sitting at the center of tentpole film franchises and appearing in…

Mike McNamara on quilting, AIDS and imperfection

The modern quilt world’s obsession with straight lines and symmetry rubs quilter Mike “Mac” McNamara the wrong way; he never cared for prescribed patterns. His emotionally evocative quilts reflect on life’s biggest issues: desire, grief, politics and childlike wonder. Often as humorous as they are critical, his quilts are gifts…

Ten things to do and see during Mo’Print, the Month of Printmaking

Last year galleries across town gave over all of March to the Month of Photography, a biennial showcase of camera-work from not just around the region but around the globe. This year it’s Month of Printmaking’s turn, loosely tied together by Marina Graves’s arts organization without walls, the Invisible Museum…

A glossary of geek, from nerdrage to fandom

Like any subculture, geek culture has its own terminology. A lot of it is self-explanatory, but some of it requires some foreknowledge or insight to really understand. Naturally, most geeks reading this will have that terminology on lockdown, but for the merely geek-curious, it can all be a bit confusing…

Director Bryan Poyser talks about Love and Air Sex

Bored Japanese businessmen started the air-sex trend, says Bryan Poyser, director of the raunchy, heartbreaking romantic comedy, Love and Air Sex, which opens at the SIE FilmCenter on Friday, March 7, for a weeklong run. Air sex is the erotic equivalent of air guitar. Pornographic mimes boasting filthy stage names…

There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire

Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…

Stranger by the Lake is a thriller in more ways than one

For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage a…

Now Showing

Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…

Omar often finds itself in ethics-free territory

The latest chin-out probe into the mutual-lockjaw Israeli-Palestinian scenario from Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, zippy melodrama Omar immediately homes in on an athletic Arab twenty-something (Adam Bakri) scaling the West Bank wall and shrugging off gunfire in order to both visit his swooningly adorable girlfriend (Leem Lubany) and meet…

Joel Swanson engages in wordplay at MCA Denver

Joel Swanson: Left to Right, Top to Bottom is currently occupying the main level at MCA Denver. The smart, elegant solo features work by Swanson, a Denver artist and director of the Technology, Arts & Media Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It represents a career high point…

Alain Resnais Imagined the Whole Memory of the World

Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown on screen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in…