UVA alum creates a different way to start the day

Holt Walker made the leap from software to cereal, prompted by an issue that turned out to be an opportunity. “It was really just kind of out of a personal need,” says Walker, who spent the first years of his career as an investment bank analyst at Credit Suisse and a senior manager at the […]

The trio that saved our downtown cinema forecasts the Oscars

And the Oscar goes to… The Testament of Ann Lee! You won’t hear that at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, but you would if Rachel Baker, Annie Galvin, and Lindsay Meck had their way. The three Charlottesville women facilitated the sale of the Violet Crown Cinema to an LLC last year, preserving the […]

David Vaughn Straughn plays August Wilson in one-man show

“You can’t say nothing bad about August Wilson,” says actor/playwright/director David Vaughn Straughn. Nor does he have any plans to. The director of Live Arts’ acclaimed 2022 production of Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline is back at Live Arts for a one-night-only staging of Wilson’s one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned. Created late in Wilson’s […]

Smyrna chef Tarik Sengul earns James Beard nomination 

Smyrna has been around for less than four years, but that’s long enough for chef and co-founder Tarik Sengul to get the attention of the prestigious James Beard Foundation: Sengul has been named a semifinalist for the Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic category, which encompasses restaurants in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Washington, […]

Our picks for hot flicks

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere Every artist who hits it big faces an inevitable question: What do I do for a follow-up? Bruce Springsteen confronted it after his fifth album, The River, topped the charts in 1980. Instead of trying to create another commercial smash, he produced Nebraska, a deeply personal acoustic album that surprised […]

Ben is back

Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz returns to the Virginia Film Festival to discuss director Ang Lee’s 1997 drama The Ice Storm, and to introduce The Sting at a Robert Redford tribute screening. Set during the holiday season in 1973, The Ice Storm examines the tangled relationships of two generations of suburbanites grappling with every­thing […]

Musician and actor Jim Waive poured his heart into the joy of music

Long before he stepped onto a stage, Jim Waive was putting on a show.  “Our household was filled with music,” recalls Patti Rightmier, one of Jim’s three older sisters. “My mom loved music. My mom listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass…” “Tom Jones, the 5th Dimension—a variety,” adds Judy Crist, another sister. “And Jim—as […]

Photographer Ézé Amos reconnects with new perspectives

Did you hear the one about the photographer who went out of his way to take terrible pictures? It’s no joke. For his latest project, Ézé Amos, whose photojournalism has regularly appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and C-VILLE Weekly, has been intentionally ruining his own work. And he’s not hiding his […]