Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…
Time and Tide — the latest action picture from producer/director Tsui Hark, one of the world’s great entertainers — is a compendium of many of the best (and a few of the worst) traits of Hong Kong action cinema. It’s relentlessly visceral, making you feel as if you’ve been shot…
Are you detail-oriented? Is your spidey sense tingling? If so, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science wants you. Arachnophobes can check out right now: The museum seeks citizen scientists interested in signing up for summer workshops offering hands-on training on how to hunt for spiders, garden-variety and otherwise. Folks…
South Dakota artist Mark McGinnis spent the ’80s exploring political and social issues in his work, in search of a doable code for living, but he wasn’t finding any answers. So he turned to religion. Embarking on a personal journey based on painstaking research, McGinnis sought to decipher the myriad…
Ron Judish Fine Arts, which will close for several months on Saturday, is set to decamp from its tony Wazee Street location within weeks and move into new and greatly expanded accommodations on the ground floor of a historic church in northwest Denver. And, while gallery director Ron Judish has…
In the last couple of months, the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000) has acquired some important new pieces. The department of painting and sculpture has received “Bords de l’Oise a Pontoise,” a painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro, which has been hung on the sixth floor…
This Is Our Youth is filled with so much graphic language, mindless violence, casual sex and even more casual drug use that producing it in a public high school would have been impossible. The story, however, has much to say about a society in which parents and children are rarely…
Apart from a series of comic reversals that crown Act Two and the vintage lounge decor they’re played against, there isn’t much to recommend British playwright Ben Elton’s Silly Cow, a creaky, one-note farce about inept critics and the objects of their misplaced ire. While the actors in Germinal Stage…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but every decade or so, the Brits come up with an entry…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete — that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete — whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoofbeats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the blood…
Welcome to summer in Colorado! ‘Tis the season to kick back, soak up some rays, listen to music in your local park, shoot some rapids, take a walk for a good cause, ride your bike a hundred miles into the mountains, spend a weekend surrounded by art, history or wine…
If you’ve somehow made it to the first weekend in September without attending even one of the bazillion summer festivals put on throughout the state, get off your rump and mosey on down to Civic Center Park over the Labor Day holiday. There you can join about a half-million of…
Tenth Annual Colorado Mountain WineFest, September 14-16, Palisade, $18 in advance, $20 at the gate; non-drinker/designated-driver tickets $15 anytime, 1-800-704-3667, www.coloradowinefest.com. Registration information for the AT&T Wireless Bicycle Tour of the Vineyards is available at 303-635-2816 or www.active.com.
Red Rocks Amphitheatre is a world-class concert venue, hosting major rock and pop acts whose big-buck tickets sell out fast. It’s also part of a Denver mountain park, paid for and maintained by taxpayers, and the city wants local residents to know the park is for everybody. That’s why, on…
The quiet little town of Salida (population 5,500), in the Arkansas Valley, suffers a major art attack every year on the third weekend in June, when the Salida Art Walk literally takes over the town. “All the galleries are open, of course, but just about every business downtown — real…
In rodeo circles, June and July are known as “Cowboy Christmas,” the time of year when professional riders and ropers earn most of their income. The Greeley Independence Stampede, now in its 131st year, comes right in the middle of the high-income season, beginning in late June and culminating in…
One of Denver’s oldest cultural-heritage festivals is a moveable feast, even though its very name comes from an early-spring celebration. In Japan, Washington, D.C., and other temperate climes, the Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, is timed to coincide with the picturesque flowering of cherry trees, usually in April. In…
Arts festivals, food festivals, music festivals, heritage festivals, historical festivals, bike and balloon festivals — by the middle of July, even serious summer celebrants can come down with a bad case of festival fatigue. Residents of mountain resort towns are particularly prone to the syndrome, as hordes of flatlanders invade…
Forget wagon trains and sodbusters. It was the railroad that won the West, powerful steam locomotives hauling raw materials to markets back East and returning with settlers from places like Chicago and St. Louis. Large-scale mining was not possible until narrow-gauge track was laid through the mountains; more than one…
Back in the day, before limited-stakes gambling transformed the former mining town of Central City into a hub of casino activity, the streets were lined with bars, with a general store and a newspaper office about the only non-drinking establishments along Main Street. In the 1960s, the bars attracted local…
With all of the attention that’s been focused on urban sprawl in the past year, it’s easy to forget that half of Colorado’s land — 32.5 million acres — is given over to agriculture. Although the majority of the state’s 29,500 farms and ranches produce meat animals or the crops…
