Sofía Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the…
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
Is it possible to be accidentally definitive? James D. Cooper’s thorough and revealing doc Lambert & Stamp is billed as the story of the managers who whipped the Who into being the Who. But once it’s sketched out the characters and ambitions of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, putative New…
The makers of Black Souls, a superior Italian gangster movie, deserve praise for executing with atypical sensitivity a generic times-are-changing/nostalgia-for-an-imaginary-chivalrous-yesteryear scenario. Like most post-Godfather mafia dramas, Black Souls concerns an ambivalent protagonist — in this case, gruff goat-herder Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane) — who has a love/hate relationship with his family’s…
The organizers of Fort Worth Opera Festival know that there are some misconceptions out there about opera. The first is that it’s all so old and stuffy; given that so many of the great works are in fact pretty old, it’s an easy assumption to make. The second is that…
Few things are tougher viewing than films about the Holocaust. Those types of movies are silent, somber cinema, leaving trembling hands and downcast eyes when the lights come up…rendering us unable to reconcile what we just saw with what we think we know about people. As hard as it is…
To be a conservationist these days is to be a person with plenty of work on your plate; as the environment changes, habitats disappear, and species begin to vanish, there are so many things to make people aware of, so many things to bring attention to, so many things to…
The Nasher has been killing it lately, showcasing lots of heavy hitters in the world of sculpture, ranging from big names to quieter talents that haven’t had their moment in the art world’s limelight. The museum just wrapped up Anna-Bella Papp’s exhibition of minimalist clay sculptures and shipped off the…
When it comes to movements in poetry, no generation is more idealized than the Beat Poets. We’re talking about post-War World II beatniks like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others. And just a few years behind them was a poet named Anne Waldman. Growing up in the heart…
We build our lives on mythologies. Narratives, often grand ones, are responsible for structuring much of the way we discuss history, and therefore shape how we live in the present. Myth and legends are the subject of the next exhibition at Kettle Art Gallery, which will be a four man…
Photographer Francesca Woodman was fascinated by the female body. During the late 70’s she shot black and white portraiture, often of women in the nude, playing with the camera to blur or smudge the image further submerging the subject into the medium. Woodman’s photographic self-awareness, her sensitive portrayal of the…
Three very different artists take over the McKinney Avenue Contemporary this weekend. Mexican-based artist Joy Laville’s paintings return to Dallas for her first exhibition in 30 years, featuring work from five decades of painting. In the square gallery, Dallas-based collaborative duo Chuck and George create an immersive installation “channelling 1970s…
Once you’ve seen “Hip Hop, 1993” by Earlie Hudnall, Jr., it’s hard to clear it from your brain. Maybe you can forget the glowing, slight-but-strong frame bent in the most “Yeah, what” body language. It’s the hole-boring eyes that know way too much for their age, and the pager clip…
Are you one of those a-holes who cracks the case before the detectives on the show and then ruins it for everyone else by shouting, “Oh, come on, it’s clearly the shifty chimney sweep?” First of all, you’re an a-hole. We covered that. But second of all, your time has…
I can think of no better place to exhibit an installation commenting on the socio-political experience of immigration than in the middle of NorthPark Center between Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom near Gucci, TOD’S, Salvatore Ferragamo and Versace. Brooklyn-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro’s work, “This Land Is Your Land,” features three…
I believe it was the great Ben Kingsley that said, “Never, ever, ever trust anyone who doesn’t like dogs. You meet someone who doesn’t like dogs – you alert the authorities immediately and sure as shit don’t marry them.” This is the life motto that everyone should live by. Any…
It’s probably time we put the notion of colorblindness to rest. The last few months should be used as tools, as lessons, as evidence that we need a cultural shift. A big one. Perhaps a step will be acknowledgment of the problems, not a blindness, but truly seeing them. African…
Bagels and carbs, carbs and bagels. They go together. Bagels are good, cream cheese is great, and running is OK. But we understand that in order to eat bagels smothered in cream cheese, you’re going to have to run to still fit in between your office chair and desk. So…
This season of AT&T Performing Arts Center Broadway Series is a good one for the little kid in all of us: two of its big shows are childhood callbacks, allowing us to relive the movies that we played ad nauseum on lazy Saturday afternoons. Annie is along coming this summer,…
I’ve always thought that Arthur Miller’s All My Sons sounds like a soap opera. Certainly there is plenty of familial conflict in this post-World War II drama, but obviously the playwright brings a bit more sophistication to the dialogue than you’d find in your grandmother’s “stories.” The winner of the…
It’s pretty much every day we dream of going in to the office and finding a tiny version of ourselves, equipped with a superpower. Even better yet, also equipped with fuller, bouncier hair and a tail. In other words, we’d either get a helluva lot more done or be totally…
