Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon…
If you consider Northern Ireland a part of Ireland proper, then An Everlasting Piece may easily be the best Irish film of the year (not that the competition was too stiff — anyone remember The Closer You Get?). If, on the other hand, you consider the six counties to be…
Nothing says lovin’ like a really big pair of men’s briefs painted in a festive theme. Although you’ve missed the opening-night reception, there are still many quality items left at the Zip Bazaar, a holiday invitational at the cooperative gallery that shares a northwest Denver intersection (not to mention the…
Don’t call him God’s Gift — Robert Gift is not a religious man. Yet every Christmas season, he settles himself into the bell tower at the City and County Building to ring its enormous and poorly tuned chimes — an admittedly thankless, if unique, job that’s required him to learn…
Even on an ordinary day, the Foothills Art Center is uncommonly picturesque. It’s situated in an old red-brick church and a pair of adjacent — and matching — Victorian houses in Golden; this charming assemblage perches on a steep hill, high above the street, with the mountains in the background…
One of Gallery M’s specialties is photography, particularly contemporary prints by the giants of black-and-white photojournalism from the mid-twentieth century. The gallery’s current exhibit, Andreas Feininger, is the latest in a long line of solo shows devoted to this important generation of photographers. Feininger, who died in 1998, was the…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne…
Playwright/filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, poker games or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough horror-tinged…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
In Lasse Hallström’s new film, Chocolat, you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide…
For a little over a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may gain its greatest momentum from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy/dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility,…
Welcome to Denver’s second chance To do the Why 2K farewell dance. As blue-faced throngs with breath abated, Exhale at last — because Webb waited To make sure folks from Brush to Centennial, Were safe when seeking to Get Millennial. Now they can storm Larimer Square, seeking fun Ready to…
It’s the morning after. The morning after what, you’re not quite sure; most of New Year’s Eve was a blur. You think you recall something about a lampshade, and you’ve got a blurred memory of that cute clerk in the mailroom. What is certain, however, is that you are hung…
Planning the perfect New Year’s Eve is never easy. First you have to decide whether to go solo, as a couple or en masse, and then locate the appropriate party partners. Next, you must focus on what kind of festivities to pursue: intimate, loud, pot-lid banging or chandelier-hanging. After that,…
Did you fly to work today using your personal jet pack after swallowing your breakfast pellets? Did you choose the option on your computer that changes the color of your living room walls to a warm summertime yellow? Just a few decades ago, those and other daily routines were predicted…
The inherently conservative quality of Christmas entertainment — The Nutcracker and its ilk — has always been, well, an indelibly hard nut to crack. It takes something as inimitably elegant as the silky touch of a Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn arrangement to ever make such fare swing more than your average…
When potter Bob Smith realized a few years ago that he was in his 25th year “of being a clay guy” in Colorado, it also occurred to him that he wasn’t alone. But he realized, too, that there were other craftspeople in the state who hadn’t made it to the…
Since 1995, the Denver Art Museum’s handsome and spacious Stanton galleries have mostly been at the disposal of the Modern and Contemporary Art department, and over the years, department curator Dianne Vanderlip and her colleagues have used these rooms, located just off the elevator lobby on the first floor, to…
Most of the time we expect to see historic Colorado art at Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art (311 Detroit Street, 303-321-4786), but the gallery has also regularly shown contemporary art. Right now, for example, Schlosser is presenting Bernice Strawn, a show of recent sculptures by this well-known Colorado artist. Schlosser has…
About ten minutes after Stop Kiss begins, we learn that its two main characters, a pair of young women oblivious to their surroundings at the moment their mouths met in romantic bliss, were violently attacked while hanging out in a Greenwich Village park during the wee hours of the morning…
It’s hard to believe that what happens in Miracle on 34th Street bears any resemblance to everyday life. But as the Nomad Theatre’s entertaining revival demonstrates, the story has the ability to awaken ideals long ago beaten into a coma by megadoses of hard reality. Of course, those who attend…
