100 Dallas Creatives: No. 56 Offbeat Intellect Thomas Riccio

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 -…

Finally, a Movie with Liam Neeson That’s as Good as Liam Neeson

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…

18 Awesome Things to Do This Weekend, September 18 – 21

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…

A Walk Among the Tombstones is as Potent as Liam Neeson Himself

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…

Wiig and Hader Brave Despair; Still Get Laughs in The Skeleton Twins

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…

A Chopped-Up Eleanor Rigby Suffers a Fate Worse than Loneliness

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,…

This Is Where I Leave You Offers Nothing

“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,…

So Funny It’s Surreal

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…

Be Like Bey

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…

Primping with Perks

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…

Better Than a Sitcom

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…

Oddball or Die

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,…

Majestic Music

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…