Movie review: Life lacks in human connection and atmosphere

Space. A previously unknown life form that is both beautiful and completely unknowable. Man’s double-edged quest to understand and dominate over all existence. Life really, really should have worked, and the extent to which it fails makes it the biggest waste of potential so far of 2017, if not the single worst film overall. Life […]

Orlando Consort gives voice to the visions of Joan of Arc

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc caused quite a commotion when it was released in 1928. French nationalists were wary of a non-Catholic Danish director’s interpretation of a revered French icon; the Archbishop of Paris ordered Dreyer’s final version censored and cut. The film was banned in Britain for its unfavorable […]

Sharon Shapiro disrupts nostalgia in Welcome Gallery exhibition

Artist Sharon Shapiro has a unique history with the Welcome Gallery, where her exhibition “Above Ground” opens this week. Now operated by New City Arts Initiative, the space served as her art studio from 1996—when she first moved to Charlottesville from Atlanta—until 2001. Fittingly, her exhibition is themed on nostalgia—or the disruption of it—in an […]

Faulkner left his mark on UVA

Sixty years ago, on February 15, 1957, Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner arrived at the University of Virginia to assume his role as the first Balch Writer In Residence. Strolling through the Academical Village in his patent overcoat and collegiate tweed suit, the Mississippi gentleman smiled quietly at the throng of officials, cameramen and students, […]

ARTS Pick: Middlemarch in Spring

Thursday 3/23  & Friday 3/24 George Eliot’s novel arrives on stage as Middlemarch in Spring, a chamber opera that premiered in 2015. The musical treatment (part of the Virginia Festival of the Book) offers humor, passion and political upheaval, while serving to commemorate Ash Lawn Opera’s 40th anniversary as it relaunches as Charlottesville Opera. “We’re […]

ARTS Pick: Stevie Nicks

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s Stevie Nicks reigned as a musical goddess. Her mystical words, gypsy attire and bewitching voice made an indelible mark on rock history, and her trail of hits with Fleetwood Mac are rivaled only by the legacy of her solo material. Pair Nicks on tour with Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders, […]

ARTS Pick: Winter’s Ruin Metal Fest

Diseased Earth, Vomiting Dinosaurs and Dreaded may sound like Cretaceous period climate change warnings, but they are in fact perpetrators of modern angst that support the lineup at the second annual Winter’s Ruin Metal Fest. Heavy metal assaults, brand new evil and foreboding of cataclysm are the descriptors that run through the bios of Harrisonburg’s […]

ARTS Pick: Irish Night at the Coffeehouse

Performers from the Blue Ridge Irish Music School grab their tin whistles and fiddles and lace up their ghillies for Irish Night at the Coffeehouse with traditional music, song and dance to benefit the nonprofit school. There will be kids’ activities and storytelling, too, because what’s a celebration of Irish tradition without folklore and fairies? Saturday, […]

79.5 bandmates are romantic psychedelic soulmates

When 79.5 founder and frontwoman Kate Mattison started her band in 2012 she didn’t envision playing gigs in a setting that looked like something straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. But, three years later after adding five new members to the band, including vocalists Piya Malik and Nya Parker Brown, guitarist Matty McDermott, bassist […]