Dallas’ annual horror flick indulgence, Texas Frightmare Weekend, kicks off on April 29, and this year, the festival will include appearances by Tokyo Gore Police director Eihi Shiina, Hellraiser filmmaker Clive Barker, The Human Centipede director Roger Corman Tom Six, and many more horror legends. Here’s a full release:

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Nothing can disarm hot tempers or reveal the ridiculousness of a fanatic like a good joke. The Four Lions takes that approach to jihadist terrorists in England, offering up a political satire that is part Monty Python, part Three Stooges, and wholly entertaining. The movie surrounds a group of young Pakistani men living in northern England who are trying to do their part to support the jihadist movement throughout the world. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, and The Four Lions finds its comedy by running its protagonists through a series of numb-skulled mishaps.

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Hall Pass is a Farrelly Brothers movie (Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary), which should tell you something about the movie off the bat. The Farrelly Brothers have the sense of humor akin to the kid who started swearing in the first grade — or who taught you about the birds and the bees two years later behind the back seat of the bus. While there is tamer and raunchier humor out there, what sets the Farrellys apart is the palpable enjoyment they seem to take in their own mischief, pushing buttons and crossing lines with self-congratulatory fanfare.

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Surprise! Nicolas Cage drives like a bat out of hell in Drive Angry — a bizarre, ridiculous, and ultimately dull B-movie about an incensed father chasing down the cult leaders who killed his daughter. Cage is Milton, a bedraggled, long-haired bad ass whom we meet when he acrobatically eliminates three unnamed bad guys (we assume) by shooting, punching, and kicking them, but also managing to magically make their car take a laws-of-physics-defying aerial somersault, while delivering a few shotgun blasts of bad-ass action movie dialogue in the process.

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Marnie Stern/Tera Melos (Sons Of Hermann Hall): Marnie Stern is well-known for her acrobatic guitar playing, but often griped about for her voice.  I actually prefer Marnie as a singer, since I find willfully grating singing slightly more interesting than guitar trickery, though her technique is obviously impressive.  Her music is pretty much the opposite of that produced by the bands I spoke of in yesterday’s It List.

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Here’s a new FrontRow feature to watch for: the Dallas Video Association‘s Bart Weiss offers some movie recommendations to help you organize your weekend viewing. In this week’s inaugural edition, Bart talks about the Oscar nominated shorts, as well as The Illusionist and Lovers of Hate at the Texas Theater. Click here for all our movie reviews.

Photo: From the Oscar nominated short “Na Wewe”

The four artists with work currently on display at the Dallas Contemporary exhibit greatly varying approaches to scale and form. Three of the artists – Michel Verjux, Gabriel Dawe, and the Oak Cliff-based graffiti collective Sour Grapes – command swathes of square-footage, while David Willburn shows intimate thread drawings. But it was not the art that initially dazzled during the opening night celebration two weeks ago, but the crowd, which was large and diverse. It was a reminder that you ..read more

That’s the bold assertion that Pete Freedman makes in his latest piece in the Observer. The tipping point, Freedman writes, occured while the rest of us were holed up during Super Bowl week staying warm. The local hip-hop scene was networking behind the scenes, seizing the opportunity to catch the attention of big wigs in Big D for the big game.

The first chip fell about a week after the Super Bowl. That’s when the news broke that Big Chief, long a favorite in the local underground scene and hailed as the Next Big Thing out of Dallas since forever, had earned himself a record deal with Cash Money Records out of New Orleans. (Yes, that Cash Money—the most bankable label in the genre, thanks to the successes of Lil Wayne and Drake.) It happened rather informally: During a stop by the KKDA-FM 104.5 K104 studios during Super Bowl week for an interview, Cash Money chief executive Bryan “Baby” Williams asked influential drive-time DJ Bay Bay (the same guy about whom Hurricane Chris penned his hit “A Bay Bay” and also the guy who “found” Dorrough) who was the best unsigned rapper in Dallas. Bay Bay’s response? Exactly the same as every other local figure’s when asked that question over the last few years: Chief, whose Eat Greedy mixtapes (he’s currently working on Volume 12 in the series) highlighting the soft-spitting Chief’s alluring flow and hard image have been a fixture in the local mixtape scene since the turn of the millennium.

A week later, Chief was signed to Cash Money.

That’s more important than you might think. It shows that another major hip-hop city is starting to see promise out of what’s happening in the so-called “Triple D,” which, referencing the city’s official logo, is what the rap community has started to call the city.

Photo: Big Chief

Tomorrow, five-time Academy Award nominee George Fenton will lead the Dallas Symphony through the inaugural installment of its new, three-year program based around music composed for the movies. We have two pairs of tickets to giveaway to tomorrow’s event, Dallas Symphony Orchestra: Masters of Film Music Presents: George Fenton. To get your hands on them, all you need to is answer this question in the form below: for his work on what four movies did the composer earn his nominations? You have until 3 p.m. to enter. We’ll draw a winner from the correct answers.

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This Sunday, the artist Christo will speak at the Nasher Sculpture Center as the keynote speaker of the Dallas Design Symposium. Reprinted below is a transcript of a telephone conversation I was able to have with the artist thanks to the Nasher. It is a half-hour conversation reproduced largely in its entirety. While the sheer length of the piece may feel prohibitive to reading online, I am including it all because this writer happens to believe that there are few artists ..read more