Though the holiday known as Day of the Dead — Día de los Muertos — sounds mournful, its festivities are rooted deep in a traditional celebration of life. After tonight, Halloween will be finished for the year and the merrymaking turns honoring the souls who have passed, with an array…
Everyone has their holiday. Romantics love Valentine’s Day. For Christians and capitalists, nothing satisfies like Christmas. And geeks? For us, Halloween is as good as it gets. If there was an official holiday of geek culture, Halloween would definitely be it. See also: How Stephen King scared me into loving…
RedLine is both a showplace and a godsend for its resident artists, who have two years to work there and show the results, both in and out of the built-in community it fosters. It’s also an elegant gallery space that accommodates every kind of art, from multimedia and photography to…
The Robischon Gallery never disappoints: Not only is every show there worth seeing, but every piece is always perfectly installed in the elegant maze of showrooms that make up the place. Credit for this goes to directors Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran, who pull off an experience time after time…
Al Wynne. As many know, the Black Forest home and studio shared for more than sixty years by the late Al Wynne and his widow, Lou Wynne, was utterly destroyed by fire this summer. The conflagration took some 400 works by Al in the form of watercolors and drawings, constituting…
Defending the Caveman. This is a low-key, low-budget one-man show, part standup comedy, part general nightclub act. Written by Rob Becker, the piece has been appearing in intimate venues around the country for several years. Becker was inspired by the comment he frequently heard from women that “men are assholes,”…
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The true story it tells is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana. His captivity…
Attention, children! Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, and unless the cook in your household provides a vegetarian option, that means turkey — a bird that has been raised to be axed, packaged, and raced to your grocer’s freezer, ultimately to wing its way onto your family’s table. There it…
The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth. In his first original screenplay written directly for the screen, novelist Cormac McCarthy takes a holiday from the apocalyptic portentousness of his No Country for Old Men and…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
For those of us who don’t live in the immigrant world and interact with it only rarely and in routinized ways, the realities of immigrant life are hazy. Now and then a news story knifes through the haze: hundreds of workers deported seven years ago after raids at meat-packing plants…
In Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, a young woman returns to her Korean mother’s house. She is pregnant, alone, unsure what to do next. A onetime musical prodigy who stopped playing the violin when she was diagnosed with a never fully defined mental illness, she has broken up with Joe, the…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore on screen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the…
Every October, the Mercury Cafe’s Allied Witches performance troupe picks a different social theme and creates a narrative around it — and the group never has to look too far to find something scary to riff on. “We always try to give voice to the voiceless and the oppressed and…
The original Halloween, from 1978, was a history-making movie for several reasons: It introduced the slasher-film craze of the ’80s; it launched Jamie Lee Curtis’s career; and it showed that indie horror movies could see serious box-office success. Tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the film will screen along with…
The annual Halloween Boo-lesque Show, which opens during the spooky season at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, is one of the venue’s most popular shows, for performers and audiences alike. “A lot of people say it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before,” notes Naughty Pierre, the burlesque emcee at Lannie’s, “and because it’s…
Gory, gross and over the top, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator isn’t just an all-time classic of the horror genre; it’s also a showcase for what can be achieved with practical effects. Full of headless freaks, attacking intestines and splattery kills, it’s a time capsule of the pre-digital filmmaking era. That alone…
The Molly Brown House Museum has been all dressed up for the annual Halloween scary-story extravaganza, Victorian Horrors, for a few weeks now — and so director Andrea Malcomb thought it just made sense to keep that spirit alive for this year’s Night at the Museums offering, an All Souls’…
For the uninitiated, Baby Hair — happening tonight at Mutiny Information Cafe — is a place for eccentrics and misfits, a gathering that began last year as a monthly open mic and celebrated a safe space for the queer community to share poetry, live music, short films, diary entries and…
The hosts of Radiolab, the nationally syndicated WNYC public-radio show turned podcast, specialize in weaving anecdotal stories and science into documentaries rich with music and sound. In fact, by delving into profound curiosity and the human experience, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, who can be heard on 450 NPR stations,…
