By Justin Hunt On Sunday, 500X Gallery concluded its first show of the season, Ripe Produce: 500X Members Exhibition. An annual tradition of displaying member works, this year’s show introduced twelve new members into the sixteen-person collective. The newness of the 500X team was immediately present: upon entrance in to…
The walls of the Dallas Contemporary’s main gallery wear unfamiliarly dark shades of black and maroon. When it’s empty, the space seems more reverent, more immersive. All you hear is the click of your heel meeting the floor, and all you see are the rich, vibrant colors of Peruvian costumes…
Last Friday’s Oddball Curiosity and Comedy Festival at the Gexa Energy Pavilion wasn’t as memorable as the first time Funny or Die brought a comedy showcase to our town. That’s not to say it wasn’t good. For a lot of comedy nerds in attendance, it will be one of the…
The Dallas video making its way around the Internet lately is the local rendition of “50 People One Question,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Awkward Brunch Production stopped people on Lower Greenville on August 1 to ask them what would make the perfect day? It’s one of those…
Kayli House Cusick met Shannon Driscoll at a volunteer meeting for the very first Better Block Street Festival in Oak Cliff. They immediately clicked. And for that year’s fest, they wanted to fuse Shannon’s background as an art conservator and leader of adult craft workshops and Kayli’s work as a…
For it to be an event, every fan convention has to have a guest of honor. The San Diego Comic-Con employs Peter Jackson, who spends his time persuading attendees that they want a 15th movie based on a J.R.R. Tolkein novel. The E3 convention brings in every Nintendo executive, who…
About once a year, the city of Dallas is treated to the offbeat, immersive theater of the Dead White Zombies. Seeing one of the troupe’s shows is unlike any play you’ve seen before. You don’t settle into a plush, comfortable seat. There’s nothing comfortable about the shows at all -…
It’s no secret that QueerBomb Dallas has been highly critical of the Alan Ross Freedom Parade that is set to kick off this Sunday afternoon. Earlier this year, QueerBomb hosted their own alternative pride parade that was free of corporate sponsorship and placed a larger focus on highlighting gender and…
Photo by Atsushi Nishijima – © 2014 – Universal PicturesNeeson in A Walk Among the Tombstones.Special guest Inkoo Kang, film critic at TheWrap and news editor at Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood blog, joins Alan Scherstuhl of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of the LAWeekly to discuss a variety of…
Thinner than Water The basis of a good family drama is the unified hatred of the patriarch. Well, hatred might be a strong word. Indifference? If there’s one thing most of America can agree upon, it’s that our parents fucked us up and we’re not to blame for our deteriorating…
They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, the movie’s…
Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
Kevin Smith is a bright guy who over the years has become a little too taken with his own persona, his own jokes, his own cult following. No matter how awkwardly pontifical or ill-shapen his movies have gotten in the past 10 years, there’s always a herd of noisy Jay…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
Unicorn, gryphon, bisexual man: Pick the one that’s real. The usual answer is “none of the above,” with the bisexual male lumped in alongside the Yeti, Easter Bunny and plus-sized supermodel as imaginary creatures. Yet Dallas playwright and director Bruce R. Coleman insists in his new comedy Mythical Beastie that…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
One of the joys that rarely happens to today’s budding comedy nerds is watching the reaction of their parents when they happen upon one of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Few things can produce such a strange facial mixture of bewilderment and confusion. Imagine how they would look if they…
Head to Mesa in Oak Cliff at 9 p.m. Thursday and take your mole enchiladas with a side of flamenco. The upscale Mexican restaurant is once more hosting Julia Alcantara’s renowned dance troupe Ida y Vuelta, which specializes in that brand of Spanish folk music and dance from southern Spain…
Has there ever been a better time to just go ahead and treat yourself? I mean, first of all, getting a manicure in a bar is a thing now. Whoever thought of that should be crowned beauty queen for all time because the manicure/libation combo is some next level efficiency…
TV aficionados will tell you that most shows hit their peak somewhere between season four and season seven and that it’s only downhill from there. Of course, we’re not sure this applies to ART 21, the PBS show that explores the contemporary art world through interviews with the world’s most…
Every comedy fan has a bucket list of famous funny people in their heads that they have to see on a stage before they die. It’s a hard list to achieve because so many things that happen to great comedians that can keep them off of a stage: nervous breakdowns,…
Considering his performance at opening night last year was met with a boisterous embrace, it should come as no surprise that The Plano Symphony Orchestra has welcomed back the young and decorated 2009 Cliburn Gold medalist Haochen Zhang to open their 2014-15 season as well. The night opens with Glinka’s…
