Tired of avoiding talking about politics with your family? You’re in luck: There are plenty of good movies out this weekend, from a solid feel-good flick from Disney, a sci-fi thriller about the way we communicate and a spy movie that feels fresh.
Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
Oh man, are we in a backlash on liberal, PC culture right now. I mean, if you can call electing the KKK’s and Nazi party’s greatest white hope to the highest office in the world a backlash. I can’t even count how many people — strangers, family, trolls — have…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating “the way of the future” ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty’s long-in-the-making Rules Don’t Apply isn’t nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all…
Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to. It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath…
As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of…
Art doesn’t simply reflect reality – it shapes reality. Here are the 25 best murals of 2016 in Colorado.
I was recently having brunch with my family. It was a normal meal, like thousands of meals I’d had in public before. The server came to the table to take our drink order, and the exchange with this man in an apron went something like this: Server: And what can I…
So you’re headed to Denver International Airport, along with about ten million other people. If you’re lucky, the wait at security (currently 27 minutes at the south checkpoint) could be the shortest wait you encounter; bad weather in other parts of the country may snarl schedules. Fortunately, there’s more to…
While the Arvada Center production of I’ll Be Home for Christmas is a lump of coal in the holiday-show stocking (read the review of I’ll Be Home here), other offerings around town look much more promising. Here are four to explore: 1. A Christmas Carol is essentially the same production…
About a year ago, Colorado’s Doug Kacena came up with a provocative idea for an exhibit: He would paint over other artists’ paintings employing his own style, while those other artists painted over his works in their own respective styles. It was an unusual move, even if there were art-historical…
Getting the turkey on the table is the least of your challenges this week: You also need to keep your relatives entertained on a very long weekend. If you’re hoping to avoid the nervous breakdown that family time often brings, we recommend getting out of the house and enjoying a…
Usually a show having its world premiere in Denver is something to celebrate, but every now and then you wonder if you’re witnessing a premiere only because no other theater in the country wanted to stage the thing. I’ll Be Home for Christmas, a musical written by Kenn McLaughlin with…
We’ve got plenty of Thanksgiving Day-related happenings, including some do-goodery and a funky dance party, and loads to do after Turkey Day for you and yours.
When you call cows, you say co’boss. And when you call sheep, you say co’da. This information is relayed to us in the first few minutes of Peter and the Farm by Peter Dunning, who’s lived and worked on 187 acres near Brattleboro, Vermont for the lion’s share of his…
Like the movie series that inspired it, Star Wars and the Power of Costume is proving a big hit at the Denver Art Museum, with out-of-this-world attendance figures. But the exhibit is about more than star power; it “basically is looking at form and function,” says Saul Sopoci Drake, exhibitions…
A French Village starts off on June 12, 1940, with a premiere that includes a German fighter plane shooting at children on a school trip. The scene is suspenseful but also staged with deliberate restraint, like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare before anybody quite realizes it. The series…
Let’s face it: While you might share some chuckles with your family and friends across the dinner table, Thanksgiving isn’t a laugh-out-loud sort of holiday. It’s mostly parades and football and televised dog shows (that is, if NBC succeeds in making that the tradition it desperately wants it to be)…
Yes, Thanksgiving Eve is a big party night, but the calendar offers reasons to give thanks all week — including a free trivia game at Ratio Beerworks, and a cool movie at Mutiny Information Cafe. Here are our three favorite free events; check the Westword calendar for even more to…
In the beginning — of the last decade, at least — 314 East 13th Avenue was the home of Bender’s, and featured a large mural of Johnny Cash, smoking a cigarette and casting a man side-eye toward oncoming traffic. When the venue changed hands and became Quixote’s True Blue, Cash…
It’s impossible not to think of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park while watching Bryan Bertino’s chilling and succinctly titled The Monster. You remember: It’s dark, and the rains have started. The Jeeps have stalled en route to their destination. The kids are in one car, adults in the other,…
