A former welding shop in West Dallas is a sweltering, sprawling den. Divided up into drastically different set pieces, the play does not require scene changes, but rather a change of pace, because we are the ones that move, trailing the performers from a two-story metal cage, a snowy-white bedroom, a dark forest, a weird facsimile of an upscale boutique. The stifling heat of an unairconditioned, unoccupied building right on the cusp of Texas summer is, for a show set ..read more

Familial responsibility and thwarted obligations have been themes ripe for the stage since the ancient Athenians. What do we do when so many compelling forces tear at our conscience and duty duels with drive? These are the enduring questions that young playwright Nathan Louis Jackson investigates in his drama-with-a-message, Broke-ology, currently onstage at Jubilee Theatre.

The play is directed by Jubilee’s Artistic Director Tre Garrett, who has recently been selected by the National Endowment for the Arts to sit on the ..read more

By the time the name of toy company Hasbro appeared onscreen during the opening credits, my expectations had reached their lowest point. It was a reminder that Battleship is based on a board game — a game that lacks even the sort of back-story or character development found in Candy Land or Monopoly.

“How are they going to make a movie out of that?” is the appropriate response of any reasonable observer. And yet they did. Fortunately, in the hands of ..read more

Je-kyu Kang’s bloated, nationalistic World War II man-love melodrama feels like the child of Chariots of Fire and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse. There’s lots of Spielberg in My Way, in fact, down to the reshot Saving Private Ryan D-Day sequences that flip the perspective from the Allies to the Nazis. How we got there comprises the rest of My Way’s often hackneyed narrative, which tells the tale of two star runners, one Korean (Jun-shik Kim, Dong-gun Jang), and one Japanese (Tatsuo Hasegawa, Jo Odagiri), who end up ..read more

With each successive Sacha Baron Cohen project, it feels as if the comedian’s best work may be behind him. If you had to pinpoint a moment that represented the best of what Cohen’s brand of humor can produce, look up the interviews he conducted as Ali G with Newt Gingrich or a number of NBA stars. Da Ali G Show offered a kind of high-minded candid camera masquerading as dimwitted contemporary broadcasting. Often brutal and unsympathetic to the interviewees, there ..read more

I’m tired of vampires. I haven’t even seen any of the Twilight films — neither having been professionally required to do so, nor a teenage girl — and yet I find myself suffering fatigue of the undead. I am calling for a moratorium on all new TV or film productions about blood-sucking creatures of the night.

Was the world crying out for a movie remake of a 1960s gothic soap opera featuring vampires, ghosts, witches, and werewolves? Star Johnny Depp and director ..read more

For some people, nothing’s scarier than a bunch of hyper youths with an amplified opportunity to voice their disillusionment amidst the frenetic chords of punk rock. It’s even scarier when that display is technically categorized as Tony Award-winning theater. A number of people walked out during opening night of American Idiot, the touring Broadway musical built around Green Day’s seminal 2004 album of the same name. Those who stayed, however, were treated to an extraordinarily staged narrative of the rage, ..read more

An entertaining lark of a film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel features an all-star cast of some of America’s favorite aging British thespians in a pleasant, if unremarkable, story about people seeking a second life in old age rather than merely a place to shut themselves away to face their inevitable decline.

We’re introduced quickly to the group of retired Brits who each separately decide that being able to stretch the buying power of their pensions in the less expensive living ..read more

Zal Batmanglij’s first feature, Sound of My Voice, follows two twenty-something wannabe documentary filmmakers into a mysterious cult centered around the beautiful and enigmatic character of Maggie (Brit Marling), who claims to be a visitor from the future. Posing as cult members, Peter (Christopher Denham) and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) sneak cameras into the reserved basement confines of the group, but once they are in, they find themselves struggling to resist the odd charismatic power Maggie manages to wield ..read more

I’ll start by saying I’m not necessarily the target audience for Uptown Player’s production of Silence of the Clams, a Silence of the Lambs parody that refers to exactly what you think it does. On my personal sliding humor scale, I have two strikes against me: I’m straight, and even more importantly, I’m female.

Why do gay men find lesbians so funny? Is it because the thought of one woman is distasteful enough that the idea of two together is just absurd? Is it the easy ..read more

Boaz Yakin gets this right in Safe, his new action-thriller staring Jason Statham: keep the bullets ahead of the beat. That sense of pacing – the tightly packed punches (a bullet to the head hear, a snapped-neck there) – keep Safe’s energy up, which proves a necessary task considering the rather conventional and lackluster heist-flick the movie wants to be. In Safe Statham plays Luke Wright, a mixed-martial arts fighter who throws fights for the mob. Oh wait, no. He’s ..read more

Jared Diamond’s great book The Third Chimpanzee notes that because the DNA of humans and chimps is about 98 percent the same, we are (biologically speaking) more like another variety of chimpanzee than we are a completely distinct animal.

The apes in the latest Disney-branded nature documentary certainly are portrayed as human-like, enough to reinforce Diamond’s point. Of course, there’s nothing that exists on this plane of reality that Disney can’t anthropomorphize.

The young star of Chimpanzee is named Oscar. We meet ..read more

Dallas Opera’s current production of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Winspear Opera House hovers tantalizingly close to greatness at times—often enough to allow the listener to leave the house convinced that a major operatic monument has unfolded on stage, but not often enough to allow that same audience member to be totally satisfied that the work has been presented at its best.

The opening moments were, unfortunately, the weakest in almost all respects. Director Bliss Hebert clearly had good intentions in ..read more

French filmmaker Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, Taxi, etc. etc.) gets executive producer and third screenwriter credits on James Mather and Stephen St. Leger’s Lockout, and while it is not clear just how much input the Frenchman had on the film, there is certainly evidence of his fingerprints. There’s the ricocheting dialogue; the terse, cheeky battle of sexes; and the winking, over-the-top action-schlock (we know it is dumb, but it is fun). That stylish ..read more

In this era of copious Hollywood remakes, I suppose it was inevitable that a studio would eventually cash in on the boyish nostalgia for the eye-poking hijinks of The Three Stooges. And as strange as it sounds, I suppose we can be grateful that the reboot landed on the desk of the Farrelly Brothers (Dumb and Dumber, I’m With Stupid), who can be considered some of the closest living relatives of the Stooges’ brand of slapstick moronicism. Yes, The Three ..read more

Broadway’s Christopher Sieber has spent years building a resume that’s as eclectic as it is impressive—his Tony-nominated performances in Shrek The Musical and Spamalot come instantly to mind—but it’s his flamboyant, hilarious, and poignant turn as Albin in the national tour of La Cage Aux Folles currently validating my opinion that he is one of the most interesting leading men on stage today.

Sieber is no stranger to this production of La Cage, which originated in London at the Menier Chocolate ..read more

The allure of wealth is the luxury of leisure. Its danger is the almost necessary byproduct: boredom. We are operating well within the in the confined worlds of the bored well-off in Antony Cordier’s Four Lovers, a eroticized exploration of the consequences of idle hands – or idle loins, as it were. As explained in the movie’s opening scene by Rachel (Marina Foїs), a quarter of the quartet that makes up the ménage de quatre in Cordier’s closely-cropped film, sometimes ..read more

Mirror Mirror is a wry, lavishly conceived, often clever and charming musical that forgot to include any of the songs or dances. Directed by Indian filmmaker Tarsem Singh, when the final credits role, and young starlet Lily Collins, who plays Snow White, dishes out the lead vocals in a fully-orchestrated, wonderfully choreographed Bollywood-style musical number, the feeling is half delight (because its fun), half relief (because you didn’t realize how much you’ve been dying for a song and dance throughout ..read more

The stories that make up Eric Steele’s The Midwest Trilogy are threaded together by setting and staging, the three-part tale told in film and theater in Bryant Hall on the Kalita Humphreys campus. The black box has undergone an amazing transformation from theater to soulless hotel conference room. The nondescript room, wall-to-wall carpet adorned with metal, straight-back chairs and a short, elevated stage area, underlies the Trilogy’s conceit: that good, wholesome folks from Iowa and Kansas are interesting because, at ..read more

We know the pandering sci-fi pseudo-epic, The Hunger Games, is off-track right from the long, swooning Spielbergian shots that frame its opening act as a holocaust-cum-mining town dressed in clothing straight from the costume warehouse. The Hunger Games is an operatic action-melodrama, a sometimes clever and often riveting adventure tale whose sweeping futuristic metaphors are hampered by flimsy characters driven by Hollywood sentiment or utilitarian plot demands.

To start, we jump from the blue-haired television studio of The Hunger Games’ dystopian ..read more

Ewan McGregor plays a habituated, uptight fish expert tapped by the young assistant of a wealthy Sheikh for an unexpected project in Salmon Fishing in The Yemen, the new film by director Lasse Hallstörm (Dear John, Chocolat). The sheikh (Amr Waked), it turns out, is an avid sport fisherman, spending much time at his picturesque Scottish estate, plucking salmon from the chilly streams. McGregor’s Dr. Alfred Jones is one of the foremost Salmon enthusiasts in the United Kingdom, and his ..read more

“How could such things happen to a God-loving man?” asks the main character in Jonathan Kravetz’s psycho-religious drama, Prayer. It’s a question that becomes the heart of Nouveau 47 Theatre’s gray, yet striking take on sci-fi persecution.

The play is set 100 years in the future, and Jacob Bergson (Randy Pearlman) is a meek stationary shop owner in District 58. The theocratic government is accusing him of being Dr. Frederick Hawks, the author of the provocative “Believer’s Diary.” They throw Bergson into ..read more

“My mom would looooooove this show!” crooned my seatmate. I see her point: My parents are huge fans of Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, and Buddy—The Buddy Holly Story. Truth be told, so am I. As far as jukebox musicals go, these are the golden standard: shows that cull from a catalogue of hits designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia yet still possessive of storylines that are coherent, entertaining, and at least mildly intriguing. Million Dollar Quartet, a fictionalized retelling of ..read more

Silent House is a stylish spook-flick anticipated both because of its daring style – a film shot in one long take – and as a vehicle for neo-starlet Elizabeth Olsen, who seduced many a critic last year as a haunted cult victim in Martha Marcy May Marlene. In Silent House (based on a similarly titled 2010 film by Gustavo Hernández, also shot in one take), Olsen plays a similar character, albeit a less nuanced one, which allows her to show ..read more

Diana Sheehan’s cabaret act, performed in the small space of the Stone Cottage Theatre (with just a few cabaret tables at the front for atmosphere, which is a tad underwhelming), is a near-perfect selection of songs that illustrate the double-edged sword of a midlife crisis. Animated and emotive, Sheehan plays the part of a woman on the verge well. The first act is all about discovery; the second, a reflection on regrets and things that have been lost along the road ..read more