Deon Cole performs at the Arlington Improv Friday through Sunday, March 24-26 Chicago-born comedian Deon Cole has enough dream jobs to satisfy the aspiration of three comedians. He’s got a national fanbase and a stand-up tour. He’s a writer and frequent performer on a top-rated late night talk show. He’s…
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters airs March 26, PBS Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived…
Dallas Comedy Festival Dallas Comedy House 3025 Main St. Through Saturday $10 For the last eight years, Dallas Comedy House has been steadily growing its festival. This year they have more stages than ever before (three), and in the future they hope to expand to other venues in Deep Ellum…
The very first QuakeCon, the annual gaming convention held by gaming software giant ZeniMax Media that oversees game developers such as id Software of Dallas, was held in a La Quinta Inn in Garland with an attendance of just 50 die-hard fans. These days, QuakeCon needs a much more substantial…
CHiPs, the 1970s TV show starring Erik Estrada as Ponch and Larry Wilcox as Jon Baker, has gotten a movie update starring Dax Shepard (Baker) and Michael Pena (Ponch). Shepard also wrote and directed the action comedy about two California highway patrolmen, which opens in theaters nationwide today. Shepard and Pena were…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
Good news for people who love shows about shows starring married couples who remodel homes in Waco. Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, are about to invade your TVs for another hour or so with Behind the Design. The Gaines’, who are currently in New York,…
One of the sly jokes underpinning this striking indie apocalypse: If everyone on Earth vanished while you were vacationing in Iceland, how long before you would notice? Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan’s subtly comic drama, shot with a gliding camera and a pleasing minimalist style, proceeds from that premise, stranding…
Mainstream awareness of Breitbart, Infowars and other unsavory conservative “news” outlets has skyrocketed, as millions suddenly found themselves needing to know who Steve Bannon et al. were. For me, none of these outlets or talking points were news: I’m Texas born-and-raised. There, free-floating libertarian paranoia is a standard component of…
Soon, the Dixie Wax Paper building in the Elmwood neighborhood of Oak Cliff will be home to Dallas’ newest co-working space, Tyler Station. But for now it’s just an empty building, and a local group called Fugitive Fitness took advantage of that fact last weekend for a free workshop that…
In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…
Cassandra Peterson, Greg Freres and Dennis Nordman will speak at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Frisco Conference Center Many actors setting out in their careers dream of someday tearfully accepting a shiny golden Oscar statue. But Cassandra Peterson, who became a pop culture icon in the early ’80s when she…
Dallas’ art scene is officially too big to be celebrated in seven days. This year, for the first time since Arts Week’s creation in 2013, Mayor Mike Rawlings has deemed the entire month of April Dallas Arts Month. “We have held Dallas Arts Week in the past four years, and…
There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…
Howard Sherman — Shifting Fancy of the CrowdCircuit12 Contemporary 1811 E. Levee St. Opening reception 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday Howard Sherman is the line leader of a new generation of bombastic contemporary painters within the Texas art scene. His background as a cartoonist manifests heartily in his human-scale canvases,…
Alice Lowe’s baby Della whacks two knives on the table as Lowe describes for me the nightmare she had before she knew she was pregnant: A horde of shadow selves in ninja gear were trying to kill her, and she had to battle Lowe after Lowe to survive. Lowe looks…
Winners of the 42 Murals: Deep Ellum 2015 Edition contest were announced last week. After several participating artists spoke up about suspicions of voter fraud on Instagram, Scott Rohrman, creator of the contest, came up with a solution to recognize and reward six artists instead of three. “We created two…
The Dallas Comedy Festival has come a long way from its early days in Deep Ellum, even though it’s only moved a quarter of a mile north from its original location on Commerce Street. Eight years after the first festival, the Dallas Comedy House is holding this year’s DCF in…
When Gary Leland walked into a store in 1983 to buy his first computer, a salesman asked if he knew DOS. “I’ve never met her,” Leland said, to which the salesman replied that DOS was a computer language and then showed him a new point-and-click model. “That sounds like what…
To understand how Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending might disappoint you if you’ve read the suspenseful, tear-jerking Julian Barnes novel on which it’s based, you should think back to Batra’s much-lauded debut feature The Lunchbox (2013). In that humanistic film, a young woman trapped in her marriage falls…
Since every cell of you dies and sloughs away so many times in your life, can you be said to be the same you at 65 that you were at 20? Such questions power this frustrating doc about William Powell, the humanist adult who happens once to have been the…
A few years ago if you asked most people whether they’d pay money to be locked in a room by strangers, they would have said no. But suddenly “room escape” challenges are all the rage, and that’s exactly what they entail. Most places offer several challenges, many up to six,…
