Italian-Americans may be glad to note that Two Family House, which centers on the Italian community in Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict the men as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered…
Artists are an independent lot — they expose and capture their views in visual terms, giving tangible shape to what might seem, at first, like crazy ideas. Crazy, anyway, to an accountant. But when an artist marries another artist, there’s a rare symbiosis, a respect and understanding of process, built…
Few marchers in life’s rich pageant are enjoying their success as much as Candace Bushnell. A former columnist for the New York Observer whose feisty 1996 book Sex and the City inspired the ribald HBO series of the same name, Bushnell gleefully rejects the dour, professorial air worn by all…
Over the last few years, Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery has increasingly specialized in abstract painting, with contemporary takes on minimalism often given center stage. “I’ve come to it by living in this environment,” says director Robin Rule, referring both to the austerity of much of the Western landscape and…
Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff, exhibition director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, says she selected the three photographers in the group show Retro Truth because all are working with memories, with the past. The title says it all retro. The first featured photographer is New Yorker Carol Golemboski. In toned gelatin…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row-houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have your cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation you take away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
Local choreographer Deborah Reshotko spends a lot of time working with ordinary citizens to create community-building performances. Intermingling art and real life is clearly her thing, but her latest project is a bit different: A collaboration with New York dancer Martha Bowers under the auspices of an NEA Millennium Project…
The 23rd Denver International Film Festival leaves the gate Thursday with an opening-night screening at the Buell Theatre of David Mamet’s State and Main. How appropriate. The playwright/filmmaker’s latest effort is a comedy about the effects of a film crew’s visit on a quiet Vermont village; it stars Alec Baldwin,…
Over the last century, hundreds of dedicated, masterful artists have worked in Colorado. But while a score of them have achieved genuine international recognition — on the level of Vance Kirkland, for example — only a handful made art history. There’s Boardman Robinson, the social realist painter who worked in…
Is That Jazz? is a real oddball of a show, a collection of bizarre, yet somehow quaint, paintings, watercolors and a construction by Dallas artist David McCullough. The pieces are dense, opaque and thick — words that also describe the tangle of theoretical concepts that underlie his work. Like Jung,…
Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the…
The truth-telling games and litany of deceptions that litter Conundrum State Productions’ version of The Maiden¹s Prayer might be tolerable if director Scott Gibson were to provide Nicky Silver’s play with an adequate staging. As it is, the two-act play languishes under a slew of problems, including vast passages of…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Early in the stunning new film by Spanish director Carlos Saura, the great nineteenth-century painter Francisco de Goya wakes from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, the 82-year-old protagonist suddenly finds himself…
When Longmont painter Rick Stoner starts snapping photos in an alley, some people get suspicious. They wonder if he’s an FBI agent, or a surveyor for the city setting them up for a property-tax hike. They wonder if he’s a plain old snoop. But nothing could be further from the…
Beer geeks know him as the world’s leading author of beer-related prose, the Bard of Beer Journalism. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, there are less-knowing types who still mistake him for the King of Crotch-Grabbing Pop, the gloved wonder of cosmetic surgery. Jackson, whose numerous tomes serve as bibles for beer-…
Located within the Jewish Community Center, the Singer Gallery’s association with the Jewish community might create the assumption that it explores only Jewish themes in art. But for a long time, Singer has presented shows that, while typically of interest to the Jewish community, have not, strictly speaking, been Jewish…
The Rocky Mountain Womens Institute has gone down a rocky road in recent months, and its this years pair of RMWI Fine Art Associates, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Dania Pettus, whove blazed the trail. It began when the two artists notified the RMWI that the pieces they planned to create…
Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…
