Believe the man in the purple pants when he says he cannot tell the truth. He is the title character in The Liar, a 400-year-old comedy by Pierre Corneille remade in 2012 into a rip-snortin’ rhyming farce by Venus in Fur playwright David Ives, working on a commission from the…
In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…
“This is the oldest skull I have,” the Swiss artist H.R. Giger says, showing off this prized possession the breezy way you might a set of Fiestaware. He lifts the skull and regards it. But then his speech is breathy and halting, tender with age, as he elaborates: His father…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
Two and a half years ago, Judd Apatow released This Is 40, the most personal film of his career. He was anxious. He usually is. His default setting is inward panic. “I don’t know if people can understand the pressure to be funny,” Apatow says today, “just knowing how badly…
In the decadent 21st century, the summer movie season now sprawls from March through December. (Star Wars: Episode VII is due to awaken the Force December 18; every prior Star Wars picture has come out Memorial Day weekend.) But I’ll stick to tradition and call Memorial Day the start of…
The final episode of Mad Men was upbeat — if you enjoy the death of the counter-culture. On this special episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and editorial fellow Lara Zarum, along with the Voice’s TV critic Inkoo Kang, discuss the final episode…
It seems that for most classical music institutions the answer to the audience problem is to pander. To program music that’s familiar, safe. “Give them more Beethoven,” could very well be the marketing strategy. And it might work for a time. Then, if things go well the friendly music would…
A comedian without a dark side is a rare thing. “There’s not one that comes to mind,” Clint Werth admits. A local standup comic who skipped comedy classes and jumped right into open mics, he pauses and gives the topic further consideration. “Some are not necessarily dark, but still troubled.”…
If hometown performer Annie Clark has proven anything to Dallas in her flight to fame, it’s that she’s a veritable rock god. Sunday night in performance with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, she proved without misstep that she doesn’t just shred with the best of ’em, she also writes music that…
CANNES, France — “Je m’appelle Max.” Now that’s an opening line, so much better in French, and it’s just one reason I’m glad I waited to see Mad Max: Fury Road here in Cannes on the morning of the festival’s second day, Thursday, rather than at home in the States…
Thanks to the torrential rain over the past few weeks, many of us are experiencing some serious stir-craziness. Flash-flooding doesn’t exactly make you want to get out and enjoy the world around you, especially when you’ve got booze and a big TV at home. Fortunately (hopefully) the weather looks to…
Saturday evening, PDNB hosted the opening reception for France, its fourth solo exhibition for Michael Kenna, a master of modern landscape photography. Following the release of his latest book of the same name, the exhibit showcases work from the past four decades representing several different projects. Kenna now operates on…
When the Oak Cliff Film Festival announced their first wave of films screening next month at their fourth annual festival it was so banging it had the possibility of knocking you off your feet. Of those first five films announced, the one I’ve seen is Rick Alverson’s quietly wild Entertainment,…
Do you remember when Michelle Obama cut her bangs? Of course you do. This inane conversation topic was part of our national dialogue for weeks. Did she look better with or without? What did it say about her femininity? And more important, her blackness? Playwright Meridith Friedman finds this microscopic…
The last day at the Dallas Comedy House’s old Commerce Street location in March was also the final day of the 6th Annual Dallas Comedy Festival, a five-day showcase of local and national stand-up, sketch and improvisational talent. The gathering didn’t end when the festival’s headliners TJ & Dave took…
Renowned multi-medium artist Kevin Beasley’s CV reads like a solid career’s worth of exhibitions and achievements, complete with an exemplary eduction as its foundation. Except, Beasley’s only been at this thing for roughly nine years. His future is exceedingly bright, and gaping. This evening Beasley will debut a new, site-specific…
Pitch Perfect 2 hit a few wrong notes for the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and special guest Monica Castillo, but LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson interpreted the film’s humor a little differently. We circle back to Sofia Vergara’s performance in Hot Pursuit, before arriving in the desert for Mad…
This weekend the Dallas Museum of Art opens Inca: Conquests of the Andes. On the surface it’s one of those historical art exhibitions filled with antique knick-knacks of which you can buy knockoffs on that adventure vacation you’re planning with your super-rich-hipster-adventure husband. No, I’m not jealous of your imagined…
Hey, it’s good to see you again. It’s odd, isn’t it? To take advice from a total stranger on how to fill your days. I often wonder who you are. Who are the people clicking on our little weekly awesome things to do list? Do they use it to find…
Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the ’20s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie, on the freedoms she allowed herself after breaking with…
Some people complain about sequels to beloved movies, while others welcome the possibility that a part deux might be even better than the first. Sometimes that happens: While The Godfather is great, The Godfather: Part II expands on its dramatic intensity without repeating any of the same tricks, and The…
