12 Killer Ways to Celebrate Halloween in Dallas

Halloween is on a Tuesday this year, which really lengthens the celebration. Let’s be honest: Any holiday when you aren’t expected to go gift hunting, get to dress up in costume and eat large quantities of candy … that’s a pretty good holiday. Here are a dozen spooky events going…

Rooney Mara Confronts a Predator From the Past in the Troubling Una

The labyrinthine nature of memory, trauma and guilt is made concrete in Benedict Andrews’ Una, a film that intermittently sends its characters wandering around what looks like an actual maze. In the title role, Rooney Mara puts her perpetually haunted gaze to good use as a melancholy woman whiling her…

21 Things to Do in Dallas This Week

Thursday Dave Chappelle has been doing stand-up since he was 14. He appeared in movies such as Blue Streak and Half Baked, which he helped write with director Neal Brennan. He and Brennan also created his groundbreaking sketch comedy series, Chappelle’s Show, for Comedy Central and walked away from the…

Cheap and Free Events in Dallas This Week

Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament Trinity Hall 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane 7:15 p.m. Monday Free Someone once said that if you’re playing “a friendly game of poker” then you’re really not playing poker at all. Poker is a game of deception, psychological manipulation and occasional cruelty. It’s about fleecing your fellow…

Maggie Betts’ Novitiate Has Greatness — and a God-Shaped Hole

Maggie Betts’ Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong…

Netflix’s Joan Didion Doc Does Justice to Its Epochal Subject

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix Joan Didion has set an impossible standard for any documentarian who would want to cover her life. She’s essentially already done it herself, brilliantly, in her essays, novels and films. Still, Didion’s nephew, actor/director Griffin Dunne, takes a…

A Half-Century Later, Night of the Living Dead Still Shocks

Fifty years ago, in 1967, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Dirty Dozen rocked American cinemas. And somewhere in a field outside Pittsburgh, George Romero and John Russo were shooting on black-and-white 16mm film a low-budget movie that would found…