Halloween tricks and treats from the Rolling Stones, Pet Shop Boys, White Ghost Shivers, and Palm School Choir, while yet another Austin outdoor festival is born

BY CHRISTOPHER GRAY

FACELESS WEREWOLVES

IV Thieves Reviewed

Michael Hall

The Song He Was Listening to When He Died

Dirty Wormz, Ryno, VIP, Public Offenders

The Parazite, The Call Me No, Welcome to tha Ground Under, Day of Truth

Kinky Friedman

Last of the Jewish Cowboys:The Best of Kinky Friedman, Why the Hell Not... The Song of Kinky Friedman

The Game Is All

We catch up with some major players in Austin's gaming universe

BY N. EVAN VAN ZELFDEN

Austin Film Festival Competition winners

Competition winners

'Mutual Appreciation'

Writer/director Andrew Bujalski is back in Austin for his critically acclaimed film's theatrical opening here

Screens Reviews

Hail Mary

Released in 1985 to a chorus of religious condemnation and social opprobrium, it's Jean-Luc Godard's most divisive film, which is saying something

Film Reviews

Phillip Noyce explores the havoc and repercussions caused by white interlopers toward indigenous peoples in this straightforward account of real-life black South African activist Patrick Chamusso and the white Boer police agent, who hunts him.

Conversations With God

Life-affirming lessons about a generous, forgiving God and the redemptive possibilities of love and charity dominate this movie based on Neale Donald Walsch's bestseller.

Death of a President

More sleight of hand than persuasive drama, this what-if story about the aftermath of a presidential assassination is technically seamless but dramatically hollow.

Flicka

Girls and their horses. They're grist for this new update of Mary O'Hara's beloved novel My Friend Flicka.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Montiel's debut feature about growing up in Astoria, Queens, in the mid-Eighties is full of the filmmaker's instinctive brio and inchoate ideas and the elaborations of a brilliant ensemble cast.

loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies

This film captures a fair amount of this band's electric charge and documents its 2004 reunion tour.

Mutual Appreciation

Writer/director/actor Bujalski has been branded the “emo Cassavetes”: His movies have an astoundingly lifelike rhythm full of small moments that only add up to something bigger later on.

The Prestige

Two rival magicians are locked in a lifelong quest for supremacy, which leads them down a slippery slope of hairpin twists and triple-turns in this Christopher Nolan movie.

The Queen

This Helen Mirren starrer provides a glimpse of the British monarchy at a contemporary crossroads between supreme dominance and utter irrelevancy.

Renaissance

Not reviewed at press time. Science fiction, film noir, and revolutionary animation combine in this futuristic story set in Paris 2054.

Running With Scissors

This film depiction of Augusten Burroughs' hellish childhood is tonally fractured and features a series of performances that pitch and yaw between "normal" and utterly mad.

Tideland

Terry Gilliam misfires completely in this dreary, unfocused, and exhausting psychodrama.

Unidentified

Satan causes Earthbound heathens to believe that the sudden depopulation of the planet is due to an extraterrestrial invasion rather than the Rapture. Holy UFOs!

arts & culture

'The Fall of the House of Usher': When Debussy was a Poe boy

With UT's hosting of the Debussy International Congress comes a Halloween treat: an operatic adaptation based on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

BY BARRY PINEO

ColdTowne Theater: Comedy moves uptown

You can count all the comedy venues in Austin on the fingers of one hand, so the opening of a new one, ColdTowne Theater, qualifies as a real occasion

BY ROBERT FAIRES

Ventriloquist Night: Public speaking for dummies

With a new wave of interest in ventriloquism, what better time for full-time Austin puppeteer Bob Abdou to launch a course in Ventriloquism 101?

BY ROBERT FAIRES

BY LOUIS BLACK

Postmarks

Our readers talk back.

Letters @ 3AM

Republican stewardship of our government has miserably failed. Polls show that Americans finally realize this, but we don't know if that will translate into votes.