Remember how the election of Barack Obama was supposed to define the era of “post-racial” America? That lasted about a minute. Then out they came, the ravening racists. Liberated at last, they no longer felt constrained about expressing their abhorrent views in public. That includes those in public office. Remember…
Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla-chest-hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 extravaganza Godzilla. In that picture — even more…
Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture as his own Swingers is to ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist and divorced father with a chef’s knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…
Looking for a chance to shout “Only in America”? Only in America — or an American movie — could the story of the first two Indian players to be signed to a Major League Baseball team get spun as an L.A. sports agent’s journey toward realizing the importance of family…
“This is the first generation that is expected to live shorter lives than their parents,” says Katie Couric, the narrator of Fed Up. It’s an infuriating statement given both the preventability of that outcome and the institutional opposition to the solutions, the primary conflict that drives the film. For the…
It’s day two of SXSW, and Mother Nature, tired of people staring at her badge, is revolting. She has painted Austin a morose gray, and a light drizzle is growing into an angry downpour. By the time a herd of black SUVs stampedes the Hotel St. Cecilia around dusk, a…
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Cannes competition entry Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th century British painter J.M.W. Turner – is the movie for you. In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner…
Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule — maybe it should even be a written one -– that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…
The Nasher Sculpture Center’s new music series, Soundings, closes its 2013/2014 season on Thursday, May 15th with a compelling tribute to the late pianist Van Cliburn. The 7:30pm concert will feature six pianists – all former participants in Cliburn’s namesake piano competition – playing a game of musical chairs as…
Cannes, on festival weekends, is wild: Every night is busy on the Croisette, the long boulevard that winds along the shore and past the Palais des Festivals, the large complex where most of the festival action — including screenings, premieres and red-carpet walking — take place. But the crowds swell…
If all of Cannes isn’t it love with Channing Tatum right now, it should be. During the photo-call for Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher on Monday afternoon, Tatum — relaxed, affable, light on his feet despite being seriously built — turned toward the press and took a few photographs of the corps…
Steven Michael Quezada can do a lot more than slyly take down the pawns of drug kingpins with a crooked smile that immediately weakens the knees of his enemies. He’s also pretty damn funny. Quezada may be best known for play Hank Schrader’s partner-in-crime-fighting Steven “Gomey” Gomez on the critically…
Tumbleweed sweeps past and Jimbob steps out of the saloon. You can almost hear the whistle from the main theme of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. You’ve stepped out of the cosmopolitan 21st century Dallas and back into a time when men solved their quarrels with bullets. Witness…
In 1976 when Ann Williams founded Dallas Black Dance Theatre, she hoped to inspire minority boys and girls to experience the power and the beauty of dance. Decades later, the effect of her arts education, dance training and outreach has been paramount in the local dance community. As Williams begins…
If you grew up in Garland and live in Dallas, sometimes it’s hard to admit when the weekend’s tastiest event is going on in… Addison. But with the city’s inaugural Fork & Cork festival coming up, we’ve never been so hungry to head north. Friday and Saturday are looking to…
What will become of comic strips when the last printed newspaper rolls off the presses? Can the art form that brought us Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes endure in a digital age? Yes, indeed, it would be just tragic to lose the pages where…
A young girl walks up to purchase a pack of cigarettes and quietly rips off a chunk of her skin as payment. In the past decade, the anti-smoking public service announcements have grown increasingly alarmist, in an attempt to stave off teenage addiction to tobacco and make the act of…
No one won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1917 – the award’s first year of existence – signaling the prestige of future winners. For nearly a century, the award would be given to deserving novels by the world’s best writers. Since the creation of the Academy Awards in 1927,…
When it comes to astrophysics, cosmology and space exploration few people on Earth carry as much clout as Neil deGrasse Tyson. Even before Stephen Colbert’s recent assertion that Tyson was his “favorite guest of all time,” People Magazine named him the “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive” in 2000. Tyson has written 10…
Admit it. Your curiosity got the best of you last year, and you found yourself curled up with a really bad book, a book so very bad that it made Twilight look like a Steinbeck novel in comparison. You totally enjoyed 50 Shades of Grey and all of its sequels…
Teamwork can lead to great things when executed perfectly, but then there’s that whole “only as strong as the weakest link” thing—it’s hard to excel when your co-chair on the company party-planning committee routinely “forgets” to book venues and order food. Theater, of course, is a little different in this…
Photography has really suffered an identity crisis over the past several years. Digital photography came onto the scene and completely took over, while, at least in the art world, film photography still had a lot to say. Many artists have come up with ways to incorporate traditional darkroom photography with…
