The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just so he could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question perhaps better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” comic strip, but it relates closely…
Down in the basement of Union Station, there’s a water-stained passageway of stone masonry that leads past a solid vault door gone green with age. Those walls date back to the 1880s, and their musty smell and weathered stone provide all necessary testimony regarding their age. Like much of the…
Giving and receiving are the most important concepts this time of year. Unfortunately, for too many of us. those ideas translate into “buying” — the deeper meanings of the season be damned. Thankfully, the holidays also offer plenty of relief from the stresses of shopping till dropping. This month local…
When Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, gets under way Friday evening, they’ll be lighting the first candle on menorahs all over town and getting ready to open the first night’s gifts. But unlike Christmas, when the whole haul is carried away in one fell swoop, there’s still another week’s…
It’s sort of funny. LoDo’s Robischon Gallery, one of the city’s most straight-laced contemporary outlets (it sells the work of Robert Motherwell, for heaven’s sake), often shows some of the oddest and most raucous exhibits around town. That’s surely the case with the holiday offering Robert Hudson: Ceramics, Sculpture, Drawings,…
Studio 1818, a boutique-style gallery in LoDo, features art glass, ceramics and jewelry in addition to paintings, sculptures and custom framing. The art exhibits are installed mostly in the back room, which is also where the frame samples are displayed — but the shows usually spill out into the front…
Is total sincerity the key to maintaining healthy relationships, or should people bend the truth now and again to spare each other’s feelings? That’s the underlying dilemma facing seven disparate academic types in Germinal Stage Denver’s production of The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton’s charming and erudite “bourgeois comedy.” Among other exploits,…
Lonely Planet, through December 11 at the Denver Civic Theatre, 721 Santa Fe Drive, 303-595-3800
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco but filmed…
When you wax nostalgic for the ’50s and ’60s, aren’t the cars what you think of first — the ’57 T-Birds and ’62 ‘Vettes of your (or someone else’s) bygone youth? It doesn’t matter if you weren’t alive then: They’re the stuff of popular folklore and, truly, the style barometer…
European folklore includes a story called “Stone Soup,” in which a wanderer creates meals for entire villages using basic ingredients that everybody possesses. The fable provides artistic inspiration for Daniel Horsey, Eric Mather and Robin Davies, who, as the improv collective Stone Soup, try to create something new — and,…
Beauty is out there, all over the place. So why is it so hard to find? Locating the right finishing touches for your new living salon, bedroom or bath can be quite a pain in the neck, a fishing expedition in a great big sea: You travel far and wide,…
More by happenstance than by design, three of Colorado’s most important cultural institutions — The Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and the Colorado History Museum — are all lined up, one after another, along the south side of the Civic Center. It wasn’t always so. The DAM got…
Through the weekend at the Spark Gallery is Elaine Ricklin & Jennifer Parisi: Recent Work, which sounds like a collaborative show but is, in fact, two solo presentations. In the front gallery, Ricklin has lined the three walls with individually framed Polaroid XS-70 photos, which are either landscapes or still-life…
Plays that illuminate the predicaments of entire cultural groups are inevitably propelled by richly detailed characters whose everyday struggles epitomize larger concerns. August Wilson’s soul-stirring dramas about twentieth-century black life, for example, strike universal chords because their theme of racial oppression never displaces the playwright’s broader message about the common…
From the moment she strides through the red-curtained setting that represents Diana Vreeland’s Manhattan residence, Deborah Persoff exudes the ebullience that one typically senses only from established performers appearing in test-marketed star vehicles. Suffused with a regal pride that verges on but never becomes haughtiness, Persoff cuts a commanding figure…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns N’ Roses theme song, it was Terminator 2, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies), one pale…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, not only was the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right,…
Elvis fans, you know who you are. You might be a slightly addled, middle-aged white woman — that’s the stereotypical prototype — but chances are you’re not. So says Erika Doss, an art history professor at CU-Boulder and the author of Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith & Image. In reality, Doss…
In the last forty years, has anyone in pop culture been cooler than Sean Connery as James Bond? We don’t think so. Thank God a new 007 film, The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan, opens tomorrow to remind us of the glory days of style and save us…
