The main attraction in the engaging, largely predictable chess drama The Dark Horse is the gripping lead performance by Cliff Curtis, a part-Maori actor from New Zealand who has spent more than two decades doing notable character parts in big films. You’ll likely recognize his face: His look suggests, at…
New Zealand’s Cliff Curtis has been stealing scenes for years now, so it’s nice to see him playing a bona-fide lead in the new chess drama The Dark Horse. Based on the life of Genesis Potini, a bipolar Maori chess champion, the film follows a coach and a group of…
Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
As generic and impersonal as a new credit-card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality. There’s a lot of excitable talk about algorithms (or “algos”), the overuse of the term…
In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old-people-vs.-frat-brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again, but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the ladies. As surprising…
Eight figures wearing hooded terra cotta-colored robes could be made out through a thick fog on the stage as patrons trickled into a nearly sold-out Winspear Opera House Tuesday night for the kick-off event to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s second Soluna Festival. They were clearly the dancers who would be…
Steve Holmes, founder of Springfree Trampoline based in Plano, has an invention he thinks can peel your video game-addicted children or man-children off the couch, lure them into the backyard and trick them into soaking up some Vitamin D while exercising. He’s built trampolines that incorporate tgoma, an interactive gaming…
From June 16 to 19, the Oak Cliff Film Festival returns for the fifth time to offer up a curated hotlist of screenings, panels and interactive to-dos. The fest’s organizers just released this year’s fully cooked schedule, so slide your gaze south to see what the Aviation Cinemas crew is serving…
It’s episode six of The Real Housewives of Dallas and if you’re like my 89-year-old grandmother, then you’re really effin’ bored with this show (she emails me to tell me a show about five rich white women doing life isn’t really for her). Or if you’re like the rest of…
If you don’t have tickets to a festival, a concert or a play over the next week in Dallas, you’re not even trying. Like at all. Because the local culture docket is crammed and jammed with all manner of events, take advantage of mild(ish) weather, sunny outlooks and the creativity…
You don’t need to possess any knowledge of theater at all to know the character of Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed lover; her tragic descent into madness, like some of Hamlet’s more dramatic speeches, has taken on a life of its own. But young Dallas playwright/actress Janielle Kastner would like you to…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
Whether it’s your terrible job or nightmare ex to blame, most of us are stressed out and could stand to chill out. Dallas-based author Jenny Block has something in mind that she thinks will help, and it’s not yoga or meditation or self-help seminars. No, she just wants you to…
Do This!Isolated thunderstorms are forecast for Saturday, but if the weather cooperates long enough, you should venture to the Asian Festival at Fair Park (1121 1st Ave) between 11 a.m.-6 p.m. May is Asian Heritage Month, and for the last 26 years the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce has…
SOLILOQUY: Jason Salavon at The Public Trust 2271 Monitor St. The SOLILOQUY series puts the focus of an entire art gallery on one work of art for a month. Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material to present new perspectives on…
There’s no doubt you’re watching a live radio drama when you watch The Intergalactic Nemesis. The actors bring their characters to life behind an old-timey microphone and a sound effects operator uses the whirl of a Little Tykes cement mixer to mimic the sound of a robot scuttling across a…
U.S. Poet Laureate Felipe Herrera could be frustrated. As the first Latino appointed to America’s highest honor in poetry, and a writer who often delves into his experiences as a Mexican-American, he could use the platform to express his disillusionment with the hostility being directed toward immigrants in the United…
On the surface, there has been a lot of forward movement on television for black women. We’re now able to see an incredible breadth of black female characters, including Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson) on Empire, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) on Underground and Dr. Rainbow Johnson (Tracee Ellis Ross) on Black-ish…
In an appreciation published in The Guardian a few days after the death of J.G. Ballard, in April 2009, Martin Amis noted that the paragon of New Wave science fiction was “remorselessly visual.” Ben Wheatley’s muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that…
Like The Imitation Game, The Man Who Knew Infinity is a Great Man biopic about a man most viewers have probably never heard of. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a brilliant, self-taught Indian mathematician who in his brief time on this earth made seismic contributions to his field. That he’s largely unknown…
