From street artists to Picasso, the biggest museums in Dallas and Fort Worth welcomed a diverse array of mediums, genres and artists. The Dallas Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of the groundbreaking performance artist and photographer Cindy Sherman, while the Amon Carter’s survey of color photography welcomed submissions from…
A theater critic character is murdered in the first act of Ken Ludwig’s comedy-mystery The Game’s Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays). Meanwhile, in an aisle seat at WaterTower Theatre, an actual critic wishes for the sweet release of sudden death. The Game’s Afoot, surely the worst play on any…
In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funny men, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela has long been shorthand for the things Mandela shows…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
For professional film critics, you’ll notice, the year in film tends to conclude prematurely. Those “Best Of” lists you see popping up everywhere around now have often been tallied, decided, and finalized by mid-November — and in the web’s ever-harried race for clicks and pageviews, that date seems to be…
After spending prolonged periods of time trapped inside with your family and either too much or not enough alcohol, you’re probably in need of a good date night. And after several holiday season’s worth of little lights and Christmas music, something a little classy is a welcome relief. The Samurai…
There’s a new YouTube program called The Grotto Talk Show launching in January. It’s only natural to have a launch party, and this one includes dinner and drinks. Oh, and it’s free. The only catch is you have to wear cocktail attire and it’s in a chapel in Aubrey. But…
If you’ve worked in a restaurant before, you know the crazy mechanics that go down in the kitchen that keep the whole place running. It’s an apparatus hidden from the customers (even chefs in an open kitchen try not to let the crowd see them sweat), but even fewer people…
Christmas is past and all that happy family Norman Rockwell stuff is done. There’s no question you need to get out to shake your tail feathers a little bit, and there’s no better way to let off some of that post-holiday steam than to buy yourself a stout cocktail and…
During the holidays, everyone gets hung up on tradition. If one aspect of the dinner table is off on the big day, all hell breaks loose: “I don’t care if you made your own, what do you mean you don’t have the canned cranberry sauce?” “You can’t do vegetable curry…
So, you’ve been a well-behaved little crumpet avoiding all Downton Abbey Season Four spoilers? You made it through the ice storm, Thanksgiving and Christmas without renting the three import discs from Premiere Video? You didn’t download the app that lets you stream U.K. programming months ahead of its U.S. air…
It’s ladies’ night, oh what a night: Paint the Town Red Parties will be holding its first quarterly event at Quixotic World in Deep Ellum at 7 p.m. Saturday. Fulfill all your bow-chicka-wow-wow dreams with demonstrations on burlesque, strip tease and sex-goddess empowerment party packages. Yeah, yeah, they’re hocking services,…
Dallas has undergone a shocking culture shift over the last few years in the area of local craft beer. In just two years the region has spawned nearly half a dozen local breweries, and the flag-bearer for the hoppy armada is Peticolas Brewing Co. In the two years since Peticolas…
The Hobbit may have been the epic movie that every movie buff just had to see this holiday season, but it required almost three hours of your life. The Texas Theatre has a way to experience true cinema in a much shorter form. The movie house is bringing eight award-winning…
A documentary-like dazzler, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is another edifying treasure hunt into the depths of a living mind. Gondry meets with linguist/philosopher/activist Noam Chomsky in his MIT office, where they launch into a wide-ranging conversation that starts with Chomsky’s childhood, crashes into the origins…
Don’t force New Year’s Eve. That’s a rookie move. If you apply too much pressure to an evening’s plans, you’ll smother the thing and it’ll die on the vine. Here’s how you do New Year’s like a champ: Get a cab with your favorite people, then drink in excess. Make…
Some New Year’s Day football is just what you need to prevent, assuage or postpone your hangover, depending on how you party the night before. The Heart of Dallas Bowl pits the 8-4 UNT Eagles against the 7-5 UNLV Rebels at 11 a.m. at the Cotton Bowl, 3750 Midway Plaza…
The presents are opened, the leftovers are questionable and you still have your kids at home for another week. It’s beginning to look a lot like … a total nightmare. Don’t fret. There are still plenty of holiday holdovers to occupy those precious little snowflakes — like the Sparkle! spectacular…
The old-style, big-tent circus couldn’t feel more like an antiquated form of entertainment if the venue were powered by steam engine. The Dallas Children’s Theater, in partnership with Lone Star Circus, has found a way to make it look and sound more like the modern spectacle that all circuses should…
