This Saturday and Sunday Texas Theatre will be home to all manner of low-budget shocks and splatters. The DOA Bloodbath Film Festival is back for its fifth year, celebrating the Halloween season with independent horror films from around the world. At a glance one would assume that DOA stands for…
Try to imagine all the time you’ve spent playing video games. Sure they are good for hand-eye coordination and can help numb the pain of living in a violent world by desensitizing you to it, but the number of hours must reach into at least the thousands, even if you’re…
Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
Aurora lights up the Arts District on Friday and Nasher Xchange puts the city on display Saturday, but beginning Thursday night the above-shown collection of house cats perform circus tricks in Fort Worth. There really is something for everyone. There’s more. Lot’s more. Like TEDxSMU, our local thinker salon; an…
(Click and drag the map around to find each Xchange location and project.) Dallas still faces a few hurdles before it can achieve its culture-hub destiny. The biggest of those are public perception and readiness: Until we want to be a city that engages with art, we’ll continue courting an…
The Lone Star Film Society has announced the lineup for its seventh annual film festival and its poised to be their biggest year yet. Along with big names like The Book Thief, directed by Brian Percival of Downton Abbey fame, and studios like Fox and Sony Classic Pictures, the 2013…
Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor, Dickensian beanpole and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear that Cumberbatch would be…
Long regarded as a commentary on the nuclear panic of the Cold War, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 absurdist comedy Happy Days now seems more like a cartoon of a long, rotten marriage. Wingspan Theatre Company is doing the play right now at the Bath House. Director Susan Sargeant amps up the…
Clybourne Park is the second great major American drama about the hell of dealing with a homeowners’ association. The first was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne’s source material from half a century ago. Both shows are running at Dallas Theater Center (at the Wyly Theatre), sharing cast…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
Few things can cause rifts in friendships like disagreements over what is and isn’t OK to eat. But fad diets and molecular gastronomy are rarely the source of contention as much as meat-eating is. Many a dinner party of barbecue has fallen apart once some unwitting attendee realizes there’s no…
There’s a vampire for everyone. Sulky teens, poor decision-makers, fashionable dames … there’s a fictional vamp to suck it up for you. And if you’re a citizen of Louisiana, then you got the neck biters in spades. Legend (and premium cable) would have us believe that in all that swampy,…
When night falls on the Dallas Arts District tonight, expect the whole area to come to life, like when forests of mushrooms crop up after a rainstorm. The Aurora Project, presented by The Dallas Morning News, is a massive open-air exhibition that allows artists to turn the nearly 70-acre district…
Gen X peeps know that back in the day, when you got called to a conference in middle school, it meant sitting through an hour of videos about the evils of drug use and how best to narc on your partying parents. Plus, there was that one video with projectile…
Has the government shutdown still got you down? Looking for a reason to get out of bed now that summer is over, at least in the strictest technical sense? Or maybe you’re just disappointed at the newest crop of freshmen Saturday Night Live players. What you need is a healthy…
The Nasher Sculpture Center decided to tackle its 10-year anniversary in the biggest, rowdiest way imaginable: It’s holding a multi-million dollar public art project called Nasher Xchange and it opens Saturday. Ten artists, each with a solid background in taking art outside of museum walls, have been selected for the…
Some people are simply more interesting than the rest. You can attempt to deny that, but will eventually reach acceptance during TEDxSMU, the locally licensed branch of the global idea exchange. It returns to the Wyly on Saturday with its 2013 edition, “And Then …” where it will delight a…
Today’s technology has transformed Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk into Mark Ruffalo’s, with its lifelike animation and graphics. It vivified scenes such as Neo fighting Mr. Smith in the courtyard (excluding Reeves’ acting), Ironman flying through an army of Chitauri fleet while beaming down missiles, and gave old man Carl Fredrickson a…
Sometimes a bloodbath is a good thing — and we’re not talking about occult ceremonies and traditions. When it comes to horror and gore, the bloodier the better, so thank God two local cinephiles joined together to create the Blood Bath Film Festival. The two-day festival that celebrates independent horror…
If you grew up anywhere near the ’80s (beat it, Biebers), your TV lineup included CHiPs and Dukes of Hazzard and somewhere in that menagerie of good old boys and tight tan pants you had your first crush. Back then you would’ve done just about anything to meet the legends…
We live under the assumption that cats defy training. That they are instinctively ambivalent to our desires. But that ain’t true, and should I know, because I’ve seen the mother-effin’ Circus Cats. This traveling crew of renegade rescue felines not only performs tricks, but does them on stage in front…
