As a general rule, we tend to avoid movies made by foreigners, set in circuses and described as “surreal.” Toss in a dwarf, a mime, a bunch of sequins and some blood and you have the perfect storm of weirdness that makes our brain, softened by years of straightforward narrative…
As far as we know, New York City writer/performer Faye Lane is not the long lost daughter of Truvy Jones, the sassy beauty shop operator played by Dolly Parton in the film Steel Magnolias. However, her Texas-flavored cabaret show, Beauty Shop Stories, is cut from the same cloth, telling the…
As an increasing number of middle-age couples struggle to keep their marriages afloat while juggling raising their kids with helping (or housing) aging or ailing parents, films about Sandwich Generation families hardly fall under the umbrella of escapist fantasy for many American families today. With his feature-length film debut, Every…
If you’ve been paying any attention at all (and it’s OK to admit you haven’t), you’ve likely heard about how the end is nigh, since we can’t seem to recycle, conserve or generally be bothered to really care about our environment. We may or may not save the world but…
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,” Elie Wiesel wrote in his acclaimed account of the Holocaust. Wiesel survived multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, where more than a million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. The death camp is the…
There is power in thread. Binding yet precarious, it weaves physical representations of abstract ideas to create multidimensional art. The actual thread in Tina Medina’s Anima Sola is embroidery floss. The idea that it conveys is the title’s translation (“Lonely Soul”) via an exploration in thread, watercolors and other media…
Stretching the limits of the two-dimensional space, Conduit Gallery will host three new exhibitions, which will defy the audience’s understanding of static structure. In his latest collection, New Work, Robert Jessup sets out to reconfigure the known world by blurring the lines of structure and space. Matt Clark’s Manufactured Beauty…
Fairy tales are usually pretty predictable. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. Sure, there might be a wicked witch or ancient curse in there, but the premise is generally the same. You don’t exactly go in expecting an M. Night Shyamalan ending. But in the Dallas Children’s…
Drawing upon both the rich cultural traditions of Africa and the artistic philosophy and themes of the Harlem Renaissance, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary’s Nobody Knows My Name: The African American Experience in American Culture is an examination the black experience. The exhibits focus on the challenges African Americans have faced…
From the lobes of seeds in a pomegranate to the feathering in a stretched cloud, one North Texas artist aims to transform patterns of daily life into iconic altarpieces. Pamela Burnley-Schol based her newest art show, Earth and Ether, on the idea that those metaphorical icons contain something so indescribable,…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey…
They’re up to new tricks at Matthew Posey’s Ochre House theater, that odd little hotbox of freakishly entertaining original work written, directed by and starring Mr. Posey. His latest is Memphos!, a 90-minute look at the last performance of the last-worst act in old-timey vaudeville. Posey plays the title character,…
Leanly scripted, directed for maximum tension, fast moving, and filled with a surprising amount of droll humor, writer-director Will Canon’s Brotherhood (co-written with Doug Simon) illustrates the catastrophic consequences of boys being boys when group-think, machismo and the survival instinct all converge. When an ostensibly fail-safe fraternity initiation (robbing a…
Comic Book Literacy, North Texas filmmaker Todd Kent’s feature-length, award-winning (read: festival-approved) indie documentary, operates under the premise that comic books tend to be thought of as some kind of “ghetto medium,” or inferior “junk food for the brain.” Seeking to shatter negative stereotypes, the film instead paints comic books…
I consider myself somewhat of a comedy nerd, following comics’ careers and listening to comedy podcasts. I also listen to NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! occasionally, but I still wasn’t sure if Paula Poundstone, the comic who is a frequent panelist on the show, was funny–so I decided to find…
With newspapers across the country self-destructing like gadgets in a bad spy movie, it’s surprising–no, shocking–that the Chicago Tribune has managed to keep around a guy who earns his pay critiquing architecture. That’s how Blair Kamin rolls, God love him, and he’s good enough to have earned a Pulitzer Prize…
Be sure to bring plenty of sugar water for the 1997 classic, Men In Black, showing this weekend at the Inwood Theatre. For those who haven’t seen it a million times on cable, the film starts Tommy Lee Jones as veteran M.I.B. Agent K, and Will Smith as hotshot cop…
If there’s one thing we’d like to see flown off the radar, it’s breast cancer. If we could pick another thing, we’d add sub-par health insurance. The special event Fly Away With The Bridge doesn’t eradicate those things, but it puts wings under them in a more uplifting way: raising…
The days of mint juleps and long Sunday lunches have faded into history, and despite the objections of Paula Deen, refined Southern cuisine offers more than the deep-fried options of years past. Martha Hall Foose’s cookbook, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, encourages cooks to modernize Southern favorites without sacrificing flavor…
Supposedly Prince tribute act 1999 does a fine imitation of His Purpleness, but so far the signs aren’t pointing to a carbon copy of the original. As far as we can tell, the band hasn’t changed names a single time during its existence, unlike the artist formerly known as The…
Everyone knows the only thing better than a sweet voiced tenor is a sweet voiced tenor who happens to be Australian. Now, let’s up the ante, because the Ten Tenors are coming to town, and there are, well, ten of them, and they’re all Australian. Even if opera isn’t your…
With a career spanning over four decades, Diana Ross is one of the most beloved figures in pop music history, thanks largely to her work with the Supremes, who scored 12 No. 1 hits in their day. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard their signature song,…
