Spielberg premieres Oct. 7 on HBO. While the studios accuse critics and Rotten Tomatoes of killing the movie business, Steven Spielberg is happy to look right into the camera and say that Pauline Kael had his number. “She was right,” says the world’s most profitable director deep into Spielberg, Susan…
Some of the best films I saw at Fantastic Fest were nearly unclassifiable, ranging from allegorical religious retellings in the streets of Budapest to paeans of pride for a profession that possibly should have gone by the wayside. What they all have in common is a sympathy for the outsider…
Start with ABBA and throw in some Prince and the Muppets’ Swedish Chef, and you’ve got the recipe for the Drama Club’s new musical, Parables (for sleeping in daylight or dark). Its writers, Ian Ferguson and Michael Federico, are no strangers to musical theater. Ferguson, a musician, is a member…
FridayCharles “Baba Chuck” Davis, known for traveling and studying across Africa in order to bring traditional dance to America, was the founder of DanceAfrica at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Davis died earlier this year at the age of 80. In its 40th year, the BAM program honors the life…
In the season two premiere of The Real Housewives of Dallas, housewife Cary Deuber described new housewife Kameron Westcott as a “real-life Elle Woods.” And nothing in this world has been more accurate. If Reese Witherspoon’s character from Legally Blonde was among us in Dallas, she would be Westcott. I…
If you have a Ghostbusters fan on your Christmas list this year, look no further for the perfect gift. The Dallas-Fort Worth Ghostbusters are putting their ECTO-1D vehicle up for sale. The DFW Ghostbusters are a local, nonprofit Ghostbusters franchise that celebrates the supernatural comedy movies by building costumes and props and…
A few months ago, we told you about Epic Waters, an 80,000-square-foot indoor water park opening in Grand Prairie. Construction on the $100 million project is progressing, and earlier this week, the Observer got a sneak peek at the park, which is scheduled to open before the end of the…
Over the phone from his Los Angeles office, David Lynch tells me, “It was all Harry Dean. I’d do anything for Harry Dean.” The visionary director is referring to taking on an acting role in John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut, Lucky, which stars Harry Dean Stanton, and is largely based…
The story goes that the stretch of snowy landscape at the end of the original cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was actually B-roll from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, slapped on by Scott at the last minute to help deliver the more upbeat ending his studio requested. Those final moments…
With its cast of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, its original non-franchise source material, its adult concerns and utter lack of superheroics, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us stands as the kind of movie that grown-ups I know often say they wish the studios would make — and then tend…
Grapevine native Annie Ilonzeh is fresh off a successful role as Kidada Jones in the summer film All Eyez On Me, based on the life of Tupac Shakur. Another movie she’s in, ‘Til Death Do Us Part, hit theaters Sept. 29. The fall thriller also stars Taye Diggs, Robinne Lee and Malik…
The recent death of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has inspired praise for his pioneering publishing empire, which helped fuel the sexual liberation of the 1960s and early public support of civil rights and gay rights. Others characterized Hefner’s legacy as an exploitative one that reduced women’s worth to their…
ThursdayWhen it formed in the early 1980s, Tesla was a pleasant anomaly, a group of regular guys from California who for some reason got lumped in with the seemingly endless array of hair metal and glam bands. Although Tesla’s music always had its pop-metal side, the band members seemed a…
Loving Vincent Premiere Dallas Museum of Art 1717 N. Harwood St. 3 p.m. Saturday $50 and up There has never been an artist like Vincent Van Gogh, so it’s only fitting that a movie about him be breathtaking and unique. And there’s never been a movie like Loving Vincent, the…
Prism Movement Theater, Dallas’ wordless theater company, is starting a new season that will give the community a chance to learn the ways of the wordless. Following the success of its 2016 production Animal vs Machine and subsequent 2017 remount as Bruises, Prism proves once again that it is interested…
Indie filmmaker Laura Scott was barely a teenager the night Jim Croce played his final concert in Natchitoches, Louisiana, but the memory has haunted her for more than four decades. Scott recently joined forces with Dallas filmmaker Israel Varela to direct The Johnny Starr Story, which she describes as a…
Even if it hadn’t been essentially lost, James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) wouldn’t ever have fit, exactly, on the Mount Rushmore of Universal’s horror greats: Frankenstein, that ol’ corpse’s wife, the Wolfman, Dracula and — since actually you can’t see him we can get away with five faces…
The city of Grand Prairie is on a mission to introduce more public art, and it’s found a practical way of achieving that goal. Instead of bronze to sculpt or canvases and easels, the city is giving local artists traffic signal boxes to adorn with their artistic visions. Last month,…
Men and women are about as opposite as any two forces on Earth. Yet many people spend their whole lives trying to find just one person of the opposite sex who is willing to just put up with them. Brian Howie, a writer, author and comedian who hosts The Great…
Burns/Punctum/Taos Umbrella Gallery 2803 Taylor St. 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday Free Burns/Punctum/Taos, showing at Umbrella Gallery, 2803 Taylor St., is a true art trifecta — three themes by artist Trevor Yokochi that combine for an ambiguous yet monumental visual meditation. The Burns pieces are…
Adam Green will present Victor Crowley in person at the Alamo Drafthouse Richardson on Sunday, Oct. 1 Filmmaker Adam Green has emerged from the worst phase of his life with a new movie and lease on life. Green’s breakout film was 2006’s Hatchet, a loving tribute to splatter flicks of…
Still trudging through the blasted desertscape of the mind 33 years after Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton hoofs along beneath the opening titles of Lucky, his richly aimless swan song, past cacti and scrub brush, the sparseness of the landscape suggesting something of the lead’s drift of mind. Stanton’s Lucky,…
