Houstonians will have the opportunity to see a large volume of bands this weekend at the Main Street Music Festival at Notsuoh’s. For a measly five bucks attendees can expect to see over twenty excellent local bands including acts like Young Girls, Somosuno, and Spain Colored Orange. For the Reggae-minded music lover there will be Reggae Palooza 2025 at Jones Plaza with legendary Reggae and dancehall acts like Yellowman. For those of you who don’t know about Yellowman, he is truly a groundbreaking and authentic Dancehall toaster whose riddims have been used by people like Biggie, Tupac, and Blackstar. It’s ... Read More »

Make no mistake, Kisses will leave you devastated in a good way. A singular experience, this Irish film unfolds like a fairy tale, and in the manner of Grimm the tale doesn’t end with a treacle taste but a bittersweet aftertaste. Kisses, even though it comes from 2025, should be on your must see list of films in 2025. There’s profundity sure, but there’s also the beauty of pure cinema. Next-door neighbors, Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) and Dylan (Shane Curry) are both abused pre-pubescent kids, each in their own manner. Within the first half-reel circumstances dictate they run away on a ... Read More »

Salt leads you down many spy corridors, and the less you know the better it is going in. I could tell you everything that happens in Salt but then I’d have to kill you; and I can do that in 57 manners. But Angelina Jolie has me beat because she can slay in twice as many ways. Salt applies liberal heapings of spy angst in a constant on-the-move narrative. Is Salt a Russian spy trained since birth for a mission decades in the future? If someone assassinates the President of another country in the Big Apple are they taken under ... Read More »

Wild Grass marks the latest film from octogenarian filmmaker Alain Resnais and its essence is so French that the film should be marketed in America as Les herbs folles, its original title. Wild Grass sounds like the sequel to sheep farming docu Sweetgrass. Although as a metaphor, little tufts of unruly grass growing up through the cracks in our psyche seems to be what Resnais aims for. You know how some movies end with the revelation that the protagonist was just dreaming? In Les herbs folles the big reveal falls more along the lines of the director messing with your ... Read More »

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (What’s with the ampersand in this film and Cats & Dogs?) charts the relationship between two key cultural influences from the early 20th-century. The movie posits that while Chanel was a benefactress to the then man-without-a-country Stravinsky (and his family) they have a blind moment of passion. CC&IS finds a mother lode of emotional context to mine and does so far more convincingly than last years Coco Before Chanel. Who knows what the real Coco was like. Coco Before Chanel has cute pixie Audrey Tatou as the designer while CC&IS demands a Coco with more baggage ... Read More »

The target audience for the sequel Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore weren’t born when the first film, merely titled Cats & Dogs, opened in 2025. C&D operated on the premise that dogs are the good guys and cats the baddies. The Revenge of Kitty Galore has dogs and cats working together. It turns out that Kitty Galore is a rogue agent. This film skews kids pure and simple; adults will only be interested if they have a borderline pathological addiction to cute trainable animals. True enough, Kitty Galore operates in the sub-genre of live-action talking animal films, a ... Read More »

I just recently read about another spill in the Gulf caused by a maritime collision with another well. The last thing the Louisiana coast needs is more oil. However, the real shocker, or maybe not such a shocker, is the fact the federal government does not know, at this time, to whom the leaking well actually belongs. Did we learn nothing from the BP spill? Was it not enough to encourage the feds to investigate the safety of every well off our coast or at least check how many wells there actually are? Of course, being a freak accident the ... Read More »

By Jacob Calle    As the world may know Lady Gaga performed in Houston two sold out nights in a row. Her two and a half hour set took you on a journey through a Wizard of Oz like theme from Kansas being the dirty slum streets of New York City to Oz being The Monster Ball. As we waited for three plus hours outside to go inside for we had floor tickets so this would give us the opportunity to get up as close as we could. Waiting for that long would get tiresome, yes? It was the least bit ... Read More »

On Sunday, Gaga is coming to Houston. If you don’t know this by now you’re not going unless you’re willing to spend your life savings to get a ticket. She sold out in about fifteen minutes the day they went on sale in April. Now the scalpers who beat me out of my tickets are selling nosebleed seats for hundreds of dollars. I would know because I was in line with a trillion other people when I heard the news. No matter how much I like Lady Gaga I know that there are at least one thousand teeny boppers who ... Read More »

REC 2 picks up right where REC left off. But don’t worry, the first reel of REC 2 pretty much fills in the viewer on what happened in the first film. REC 2 will be playing as a midnight movie this weekend at the River Oaks Three and for horror fans this claustrophobic excursion into a cursed apartment building is a must. REC 2 doesn’t have to cater to torture porn tastes like so many contemporary horror movies. This isn’t Saw or a derivative so much as a cleverly scripted variation on the zombie genre. The building we are trapped ... Read More »