This morning the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association (DFWFCA) announced the winners of its 22nd annual film critics awards. If you somehow missed this article’s headline: Thomas McCarthy’s based-on-a-true-story newsroom drama Spotlight won Best Picture, as well as a few other awards. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter…
As we pull into the home stretch of another busy holiday season, you either need exactly zero help filling your calendar or you need the sweet, sweet relief that comes from spending time with patrons of the arts as opposed to patrons of the NorthPark parking garage. If you fall…
Ben Stevenson’s The Nutcracker is a stunning production with choreography exquisite enough to bring a Christmas dream to life and accentuate Tchaikovsky’s melodies. With athleticism and grace set to music, a story is magnificently told without words. Every performance makes use of 200 exotic costumes and there are three different…
When The Mindy Project debuted in 2012, one of its two main inspirations, the big-screen romantic comedy, was already dead. Kate Hudson’s last studio rom-com (Something Borrowed) was released the year before, Katherine Heigl’s (Life as We Know It) the year before that. With their Harry/Sally-esque slant-rhyming names, The Mindy…
If everything goes according to plan, this will be Wanda Dye’s last weekend in Dallas. After her closing party on Sunday, the artistic force behind RE Gallery, a progressive space in The Cedars neighborhood, packs her shotgun shack and heads home to Alabama to be closer to her family. Although…
For years, we’ve brought you an extensive, all-encompassing list of weekend events. These long, unwieldy documents were beginning to feel passé. No one knows the high and low brow of Dallas culture, dining and music better than we do, so we decided to pare down these guides to just the…
So you’re alive and in Dallas during the release of Star Wars: Force Awakens. You know there’s no escaping the power. It’s everywhere: Star Wars is on your jewelry, in your food, on emblazoned on your buildings. It’s roving your house with gleeful boops and beeps. Many of you have…
RE Gallery Closing Party Wanda Dye’s sharp eye for emerging talent, and endless taste for the perfectly eccentric turned RE Gallery into one of the can’t miss spaces in Dallas. Since opening a gallery in her shotgun shack in The Cedars three years ago, she’s exhibited some of the most…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
Opening night of Le Sacre du printemps, better known to English speakers as The Rite of Spring, created one of dance history’s most infamous stories. With music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, this ballet concert opened in 1913 with the subtitle, “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts.” Both the…
Any way you slice it, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as classic a holiday offering as fruitcake. And like that redoubtable dessert, it’s best served fresh, a little nutty and with extra dollops of sweetness. Three DFW theaters are ending the year with productions of A Christmas Carol. They’re…
There’s a new “fun” business on your radar — one your mom will for sure bring up the next time you call her. Like the great Gwen Stefani once said, “This shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S,” and boy, this shit really is bananas! You remember that potato business we reported on…
PICTURE OLIVER Welcome to the home of Larry Oliver and Jamie Laubhan-Oliver, two graphic designing badasses that dabble in home design, greenhouse building and concrete-picnic-table making. Basically, they have more talents than they have last names and chief among them is making the rest of us hobos jealous. But don’t…
Christmas tunes are already on loop in every store and restaurant, the gift lists are getting decidedly more expensive, you’re probably already tired of Christmas, and it’s not even here yet. This time of year can be a real bitch, especially if you’re a responsible grown-up with Christmas parties to…
If you’re hunting for real, down-and-dirty fantasy football tips, and the Dallas Observer arts and culture blog doesn’t strike you as the best possible place to find them, you’re onto us. We don’t have any of those for you. Please stop caring about sports so much and put that brain…
There’s a certain kind of madness to the holidays —- a kind of sugar rush, glassy-eyed fervor that’s somehow completely lovely and totally overwhelming. I think this is particularly true for the men and women out there who put a soul-crushing pressure on themselves to find the perfect gift. You’ll…
If you haven’t already started your holiday shopping, you’re going to want to get on that pronto. December 25 will be upon us before you know it, and unless you’ve decided to forgo the exchange of material possessions on the holiday as some kind of anti-capitalist protest, you’d better get…
Desmond Blair didn’t put “born without hands” on his resume back in 2010. On paper, he met the qualifications for the jobs he applied for after earning his degrees in Art and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. But people acted strange when he showed up to job…
Thursday, December 3 Holiday Presence 11 If you’re the kind of person who prides themselves on buying the perfect gift for the people in your life, or if you’d like to be that kind of person, you really can’t go wrong with a work of art. Especially one by a…
SOFT4SOFT Housed in a storefront in Expostion Park, Beefhaus is one of the city’s few artist-run spaces keeping things fresh. Recently re-invigorated with a swath of new artists at the helm, the space is off to roaring start. This weekend, Pierre Krause curates SOFT4SOFT a group show featuring artists, Kyle…
Cynthia Nixon is such a terrific actress that she can steady even the wobbliest material. In writer-director Josh Mond’s modestly scaled family drama James White, she plays Gail, the mother of twentysomething underachiever James (Christopher Abbott, of Girls), a guy who can never seem to lay hands on a clean…
