Now Showing

Another Victory Over the Sun. For this group show, all of the exterior light sources at MCA Denver have been covered over so that the interior is essentially dark. Organized by director Adam Lerner and assistant curator Nora Burnett Abrams, Another Victory is made up of art that’s meant to…

Now Showing

Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

The Guard is a shaggy-man character study

The Guard is a shaggy-man character study, its subject a fifty-something policeman in West Ireland, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). No by-the-book cop, Boyle spends his days off romping with hookers and has no qualms about gulping MDMA from the pockets of a freshly dead teenager; he also displays a…

One Day doesn’t offer much in the way of guilty pleasures

Directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by David Nicholls and based on his novel, One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She’s nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich-boy college classmate. She’s earnest, tenacious…

The Conan remake comes alive only when people are being hacked to bits

A cinematic reboot for the patron saint of 98-pound weaklings, Conan the Barbarian is both truer to the vision of its character’s creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than John Milius’s 1982 movie incarnation. Director Marcus Nispel, along with no fewer than three screenwriters, eschews the lugubrious mythmaking…

Edge Theatre Company’s Faithful misfires

The opening scene of Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful is intriguing: a woman tied to a chair, a mobster with a gun preparing to finish her off. The tension is ready-made, and the dialogue comically and continually upends our expectations. The woman, Margaret, is feisty, scoffing at the very idea of a…

Welcome to Magic Laundry, the most depressing place on earth

In a turn of events I cannot describe, I ended up at the Magic Laundry on South Monaco Parkway and Iliff Avenue last night at 10 p.m. Positioned in the back, shabby corner of a dead strip mall left label-scarred by its now-vacant anchor store, King Soopers, the 24-hour laundromat…

Denver’s Slam Nuba wins the National Poetry Slam

It’s been a banner year for Slam Nuba, the newer nationally competitive arrival on the Denver slam poetry scene, and for a group started hardly four years ago, it’s seen some remarkable achievements already. Having placed in the top ten finishing teams at the National Poetry Slam (slam poetry’s annual…

Google+ adds games, now you can ignore work in new ways

What makes Google+ games, since people apparently now demand a gaming platform on every social network imaginable, different than Facebook games is pretty simple: the games don’t show up in your feed, meaning you won’t be bombarded with news every time a friend tops your score or plants a new…

“Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” is terrifying, bloody mess

Encapsulating everything that is creepy about talking inanimate objects created in the name of children’s television programming, this new video from the London-based This Is It Collective is just that: creepy. The short begins innocently enough, with a small cast of sort-of identifiable characters sitting around a table and sing-talking…

Welcome Back to Bessemer! in Pueblo, where Colorado history was forged

The town of Bessemer, which immediately surrounded Pueblo’s storied reason-to-be, the mighty Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, was incorporated in 1886, 125 years ago. It was home to hard-working immigrants from around the world — Italians, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Asians and others — who moved to the area to work…

Reader: I will never apologize for my audible flatulence

After intermittent bouts with alcoholism and diet pills, Bree Davies has channeled her addictive personality into a somewhat less unhealthy obsession: yoga. That’s the subject of her latest edition of Breeality Bites, wherein she acknowledges that it comes with the side effect of trying to compete with grandmothers but denies…

The Help is this week’s most ridiculous trailer

Gather round, children, and I will tell you of a time — it was, like, at least 50 years ago — when there was racism. Those days are over, of course, and in the bright future of today all humans live in perfect harmony with no economic or institutional discrepancy…

Top five ways to break out your bike this weekend

Get the lead out! Will he? Won’t he? As of this writing Lance Armstrong hadn’t yet tweeted his intention to compete in the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race on Saturday (he pre-qualified by winning the Crested Butte Alpine Odyssey on July 31), but one of the gnarliest events in Colorado…