In the Golden Age of scripted television, reality TV is supposed to be dying, but you wouldn’t know it from Survivor’s tenacious resilience — or its just-debuted 31st season. The show that launched reality TV as mainstream programming at the turn of the millennium returned two weeks ago with an…
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel. All that we know, that we’re made of, is motion. -Amy Clampitt For approximately 90 minutes Tuesday night, two projectors set at random cast video onto a small web of white screens. One scene, vivid and floral, quickly becomes disorienting, the flowers…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
Aurora The ephemeral nature of the biennial event, Aurora, gives the whole night a sense of magic. It also requires something of visitors: clear the calendar and show up. Starting at 7 p.m. Friday, 19 city blocks will be filled with light, video and music to create a sometimes messy,…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator, Sorkin’s latest is less a novel exposé than a distinctly Sorkinian dramatization of well-known…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Ask comedian Sebastian Maniscalco what he’s currently stressing over, and he doesn’t hesitate – home remodeling. Specifically his. “We have the contractors, and trying to figure out what tile to pick out,” he says. “People out there they can’t get work and they’re hungry and in the grand scheme of…
The future of theater in Dallas should be what The Drama Club is doing with Faust. This all-local consortium of disgustingly talented writers, actors, directors and designers has created a fresh and contemporary version of the old Goethe tale (with shades of Christopher Marlowe) of a doctor who sells his…
Local underwater fashion photographer Jeremy McKane will have an installation that interacts with your mind at the inaugural show at the MAC’s new location in The Cedars. It’s called Lucid and he refers to it as a living installation that addresses toxicity in the ocean. His mind-controlled digital video projection…
It’s got to be one of the most challenging things to achieve in cinema history: How do you truly frighten the hell out of a movie audience? These days, in the Internet age, wherein we meticulously dissect films for accurate representations of reality and feasibility, it’s hilariously difficult. But when…
Sometimes, not much seems to being going on in Dallas. Whether that’s because of our general proclivity toward staying in comfortable bubbles or a lack of good public relations, it’s easy to feel like the only thing to do is spend yet another weekend at the mall or in a…
There never was a Jack the Ripper, you know. Between 1888 and 1891 in London’s Whitechapel, 18 women were killed by sharp instruments. Some victims were prostitutes. Five were thought to have been murdered by the same person. He, or she, was never found, never brought to justice. Suspects…
So, you say little Timmy isn’t quite ready for an all-day Halloween home video fest featuring all seven (!) Saw movies? Hmph. Well, you know your 5-year-old best, we suppose, but that doesn’t mean you and your children can’t enjoy Halloween and the arrival of fall. Your family can choose…
Have you ever thought it would be fun to view Earth from space, the whole world seeming so small and delicate you could hold it in the palm of your hand? Well, you can simulate that experience and party while you do it at the fourth Diorama-o-Rama from 4-8 p.m…
1. Drinking Fountain #1 In the Dallas Records Building at 509 Main St., Lauren Woods made a public sculpture out of what was once a “Whites Only” drinking fountain. The county had put a plaque on top of the remnants of the prohibitive sign, but she decided to replace that…
Thursday, October 8 The Whale You’re fat, America, particularly you, Texas. If the statistics weren’t constantly reminding us of this, you’d simply have to look at the other people on the streets. Not walking, but driving in the car next to you. That obesity is a problem in a country…
Holly Jefferson is one of those people. You know, like, happy and cheerful and generally pleasant to be around. When you walk into her house, there’s a floor-to-ceiling, open room divider that’s painted bright yellow. Break out your protractor and turn forty-five degrees to the left, and there’s a bright…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, 10 years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
If you’re not making the pilgrimage to Marfa for Chinati International Pop If I told you to name an artist from the Pop Art movement, it’s more than likely you’d mention names like Warhol or Lichtenstein. In fact, most of the artists who come to mind for most people are…
When a musical bills itself as scary, it’s natural to be a little dubious. Unless what scares you are chorus girls or people who sporadically break into song and dance — which, granted, can sometimes be pretty horrifying — the odds of a staged musical sending a shiver down your…
