Consider Dracula––really consider him. Despite what commerce and fandom suggest, the story of Dracula (any vampire, really) is hinged on emotional intelligence and moral complexity. To put a finer point on it, the reader or viewer is forced to confront certain issues in ways that challenge the accepted moral and…
If you’re on the highway Thursday afternoon and you notice a straight couple on a motorcycle, and the girl looks suspiciously like Tibby from Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, don’t strain your neck looking. Yes, that’s actress Amber Tamblyn. And no, that role is not the most interesting thing about…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about 10 awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. Over the past year or so, the issue of police brutality has, some would say, finally seeped into the mainstream consciousness. The tragic deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown,…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about 10 awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. When she moved to North Texas to work on A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project in 2009, Lauren Woods had been living in San Francisco for 10 years and was…
With every stitch or every tear in the fabric, Diedrick Brackens is creating or, more aptly, unraveling a much larger cloth. In a new exhibition at Conduit Gallery, hearts, hands, and other members, of his latest textile works, Brackens continues his exploration of issues of race, tradition and gender, but…
Not much dialogue, but wow, what sizzling drama in Matthew Posey’s latest play, Buñuel Descending, which enjoyed a short sold-out run at Ochre House. A revival is a must, the sooner the better for this sexy one-act that let music and flamenco dance take the place of words. This is…
Pause now to consider The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. The 1957 one-act opens the 25th season for Kitchen Dog Theater, now working in its new (temporary) home at The Green Zone on the edge of the Design District. The smaller theater is an awkward fit for a company used…
The headline says it all. Donald Trump is in a city where more than 40% of the residents are Latino, making a campaign trail stop at the American Airlines Center. And if you can bear to spend five more minutes looking at his face you can do some ridiculous things…
It always seems as if September is the calm before the holiday storm. Once Halloween is knocking on the door, the rest of 2015 will fly by as a whirlwind of awkward visits with family and mountains of credit card bills from all that gift buying. The next couple of…
Talk radio overflows with inflated opinions and overgrown egos. Most hosts masquerade as a friendly, or not so friendly, omniscient interviewer. The voice of Krys Boyd, the host and managing editor of the radio and TV chat show “Think,” which airs from 12-2 p.m. and again at night Monday through Thursday on…
There was some yelling but nobody got punched at this year’s DFW Theater Critics Forum luncheon. Nobody left angry either, which might be a first. Every September the print and online theater critics of Dallas and Fort Worth eat chicken and brownies together and hash over the previous year’s productions…
Last June, Claire Wilcher of Indianapolis, Indiana started a trip that most people only get to talk about taking in their lifetime. She quit her job, packed up her stuff and threw into a renovated RV for a 23-city trip that will take her to major cities across the country…
Welcome to 10 Brilliant Dallas Women, a pop-up online series about 10 awesome women making Dallas a better place to live. Haylee Ryan has a policy that when an opportunity lands on her plate from out of the blue, she seriously considers it. And that’s more or less how the…
Serving Second Chances begins with a gorgeous shot of the Dallas skyline before the camera pans down to a man sleeping on a bench in front of City Hall. During a Robert Johnson lookalike contest at The Stewpot, guitarist Gerald Williams showed up out of nowhere and won first prize…
LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…
The only libraries at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center are law libraries. Inmates crowd in the rooms on a weekday, buried in legal books, as if they’re in law school. And in a sense they are. People use the law libraries here mainly to understand their criminal charges, looking for…
The way is clear, the light is good and the singing, acting and comedy in Lyric Stage’s to-the-hilt production of Into the Woods are absolutely enchanting. From the frantic overlapping lyrics of the opening prologue to the sweet, soaring poetry of “No One Is Alone,” the hopeful ballad at the…
Thursday, September 10 Josie and the Pussycats There are guilty pleasures, and then there are bad movies. Guilty pleasures are films that don’t have much artistic merit, but watching them won’t necessarily make you dumber. A guilty pleasure may be mildly offensive or politically incorrect, but it doesn’t mean to…
Sergeant Amy Mills is busy. Not so busy that she can’t spare some time to talk about the job that she loves, but her brisk gait and purposeful demeanor are an instant giveaway that she’s a woman on a mission. And that mission—to resolve the backlog of rape kits in…
Despite a vibrant and burgeoning film community here in Dallas (thanks Dallas Film Society, Texas Theatre, Video Association of Dallas and the many, many others who make it happen) we tend to pay a great deal of attention to what’s new while more or less neglecting the old. We can…
The first time I stepped foot in a public library, I was an eleven-year-old awkward new girl in Butler, Pennsylvania: a steel mill town north of Pittsburgh. Since my family had already moved twelve times by then, I was used to panicking over where to sit at lunch and navigating…
Simon Bilodeau’s Story With No Ending In a sense, the museum is the sculpture housing a painting. Typically manipulated to be as unobtrusive as possible, it interacts, intentionally or otherwise, with the work on display. The two are inextriable. It follows that an artist would be hyper aware of the…
