Denver’s Lost Movie Theaters, Take 2

After World War II, downtown Denver started to decay, and movie palaces disappeared. The Curtis Street pleasure row came down, and the grand old houses that remained turned into adult-film showrooms, places that sold beer, too, dark and dangerous and filled with stink. (The tradition of dirty movies downtown is old…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Sam Tallent

#2: Sam Tallent Denver comic Sam Tallent, an off-the-cuff kingpin of the local comedy scene and a member of the Fine Gentleman’s Club, probably exited the womb cracking wise. When he’s not on the road, he frequents several stages — tag-teaming with the Fine Gents at Deer Pile’s Too Much…

Starship Troopers Combines Hard Truths and High Adventure

Some combinations, like peanut butter and chocolate, are self-evident. No one needs to tell you those two are going to work great together; it’s obvious if you’ve tried them both. Others, like chicken and waffles, are a little weirder, but just as great once you try them. Paul Verhoeven’s 1997…

Denver’s Lost Movie Theaters Take 1: Roll ‘Em

There are ghosts on the grid. The new owners of what was once the Webber movie theater at 119 South Broadway recently applied for a certificate of non-historic status — a first step toward allowing the building to be demolished. Losing landmarks is nothing new in Denver; waves of development…

Art Review: Geometric Works Featured at Michael Warren Contemporary

Mike McClung, the director of Michael Warren Contemporary, has put together two interesting solos that are midway through their runs. The shows are extremely compatible, as both focus on artists who work with geometric compositions, though each does so in a thoroughly individual way. In the large set of spaces…

Playbill: Three New Shows in Denver for November 18-23

This week on local stages, hear immigration stories from Theatre Esprit Asia, learn the greatest source of angst for professional opera singers at Opera on Tap (clue: it’s not the opera’s bombastic plot), or help a couple of local nonprofit endeavors while having the time of your life at the…

Winter Park Resort Opens Today: Here’s What’s New for 2015

Opening November 18 WINTER PARK RESORT winterparkresort.com 970-726-1564 What’s new: Winter Park Resort is introducing radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, “which allows guests hands-free access to all base-area chairlifts” says Winter Park spokesman Steve Hurlbert. “Instead of having to produce a ticket or pass to be scanned, visitors simply place their…

Peggy Guggenheim Speaks for Herself in Art Addict

In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history: Check…

Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea Offers Little More Than Location

It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense that they were…

Brooklyn Reveals Saoirse Ronan as One of the Greats

Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…

History Passes By in a Flash in Trumbo

Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like a costumed kid playing actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you could…

Mockingjay — Part 2 Transcends the Hollywood Blockbuster

With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since the Hunger Games movies started, in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else…

The Mayday Experiment: Nous Sommes Tous des Réfugiés

Paris. Beirut. Kenya. Iraq. Syria. It’s hard to think about the tiny house and my life when the world is in chaos and so many are mourning losses. It’s hard to contemplate the future when the present is so urgent, so disrupted. The Mayday Experiment feels worlds apart from these…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Alexis Cooley

#3: Alexis Cooley  When Alexis Cooley isn’t working as the executive producer and director of the Boulder International Fringe Festival (which some think might be never), she’s a one-women production company, keeping busy as “an artist, a performer, a director, a creator, a producer, a traveler, an adventurer, an entrepreneur,…