Gayle Crites and Andrew Beckham. As she usually does, Tina Goodwin has paired a couple of solos at her namesake gallery, with one in the larger front space and the other in the smaller corridor in back. At first glance, Gayle Crites: The Cloth That Binds appears to be an…
Basically a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to the female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is also a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, however, In Secret…
Two words uttered in the dark — “What happened?” — open The Square, Jehane Noujaim’s powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt’s struggle for meaningful change. Several documentaries on the country’s 2011 uprising, including Uprising and Tahrir: Liberation Square, rushed to answer that question, and suffered from a certain shortsightedness as a…
In If You Build It, a documentary about a high-concept high school product-design class in, of all places, rural North Carolina, director Patrick Creadon collects rich material but builds a rickety structure. The program is Studio H, led by two enterprising, idealistic architects who are brought to rural Bertie County…
The tech crew at the Denver Center Theatre Company includes some of the best people in the country, and their budget is clearly generous, but their work can only carry a production so far. The set for Hamlet is a subtle wonder of stone and steel, offering frequent glimpses of…
In the last decades of the twentieth century, conceptualism was on the upswing in the wake of pop art and minimalism, both of which have big conceptual components. The cutting-edge work of the ’80s and ’90s was heavy with narrative, and artists often chose representational approaches to tell their stories…
No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter or an Internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past thirty years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or at least remake…
In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…
Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…
The book trailer for author Gary Shteyngart’s newest release, Little Failure, is dececeptive: The four-minute short stars James Franco — a former student of Shteyngart’s at Columbia University — as his fictional lover, one who writes a book that outshines the real author’s upcoming release. In reality, the married father…
Are you gagging on Oscar-nominated, highbrow movies? Clean your palate with world-class garbage at Reel Social Club’s anti-Oscar bash, the PBBT — Golden Raspberry Party. “At the Denver Film Society, we play very serious films, and it’s always fun to get people together to remember that bad films, for better…
The hairiest, most slobbery and goofiest-looking canines will strut their stuff today at Worst in Show, a fundraiser for Freedom Service Dogs. Inspired by the cinematic wackiness of the 2000 movie Best in Show, this first edition of the local nonprofit’s beastly dog challenge is a gathering of only the…
Whether or not you attended prom in high school, “it is sort of a pinnacle event,” notes Michelle Baldwin (aka Vivienne VaVoom), spokeswoman for the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC). “And if you truly want to go to prom, it’s rather sad if the only reason…
Our town rocks the arts all year ’round, from those crowded First Friday art walks to the vibrant club scene, where live music thrives; there’s so much to do that it’s often difficult to make room for it all. But one night a year, Westword makes it easy for you…
“We decided that since none of the cool vendors ever participate in cheesy bridal expos, we would just put all of the cool kids together in one room,” says Tom Wright, whose company, Lovesick Inc., is behind today’s Lovesick: Denver 2014. A traveling collaboration with the world’s largest alternative wedding…
In this age of digital video, on-demand entertainment and HD picture, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary the VHS era really was. Not only could you watch movies at home, but you could make your own, even if you had no training, budget or discernible skill. Those movies live on,…
Since it premiered seventy years ago, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has been performed in countless incarnations and studied in high-school classes all over the country. But Phamaly Theatre Company’s version of the classic offers something none of the others do, says director Bryce Alexander. “Our Glass Menagerie is different…
Sixty years after her death, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo continues to capture the attention of modern audiences; she’s commemorated in everything from yearly tributes to her iconic unibrow to films including the 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek. But years before that movie told Kahlo’s colorful story, Denver playwright Melissa Lucero…
In the 1970s, second-wave feminists began fighting for gender equality all over the country, including Colorado. As part of that current of change, Front Range Women in the Visual Arts, a grassroots collective, was founded in 1974 to study and promote the visibility of female artists through innovative exhibits, exchange…
After Boulder County’s devastating floods in September, the City of Boulder and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art quickly mobilized to put artists on the job for the Flood Project, actually a series of projects commemorating the disaster and lifting the human element out of the mud it left behind…
Books and documentaries abound on the subject of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, the Los Alamos-based lab where scientists researched and built the atom bomb during World War II. But what about the young wives who followed their husbands to Los Alamos, where they lived in a shroud of…
