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Arthur Penn's film is an eclectically epic anti-Western that turns Ford's red-hued racist conventions on their ear.

Anyone who needs reminding of the glory that was film noir, and the belly flop that was 1960s cinema, need only rent the Criterion Collection's 2-DVD set of Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, filmed in 1946 and 1964 by Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, respectively.

Live Shot

Allergic to taxes, the Lege tries to balance the budget with the rolls of the dice.

SXSW Records

The Bedlam Faction is as smart a bunch of actors as you'll find, and they take the Jacobean tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and make its extra-dense language crystal clear and its characters comprehensible, and the story relatively easy to follow, but the production suffers from a flatness born of a lack of specificity.

"Casares has been listening," Roger Gathman writes of the Brownsville native's Brownsville: Stories. "His dialogues seem to hang just outside the realm of literature, which is where real writing happens." The recent Dobie-Paisano fellow will kick off his book tour at BookPeople on Thursday, March 6, at 7pm.

Third Place

How Dead Man Walking came to be an opera -- and to be produced in Austin before almost every other city in the world -- reveals the great risks and rewards in developing new works for the modern operatic stage.

There is plenty of bad and ugly to go along with the good, yet each character in Sergio Leone's American opus seems to live inside a cinematic glass orb in which his virtue and his vice settle like snowflakes around an elegy to himself.

In conjunction with its production of the opera Dead Man Walking, Austin Lyric Opera will present a seminar focusing on the unlikely journey of her story about providing spiritual counsel to a convicted murderer on death row to the operatic stage.

In Bash, a collection of monologues by Neil LaBute, the protagonists appear to be considerate, decent people, but in the stories they share they prove themselves capable of committing crimes straight out of Greek tragedy, and the dirigo group production achieves a breezy intimacy with the audience, engaging us so thoroughly that when the darkness falls, we find it hard to abandon them.

Texas Platters

Don't call it magic realism: Josephine Sacabo's photography and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo make a powerful pair.

Jonathan Carroll brings his White Apples to BookPeople on Saturday, Nov. 9, 3pm. Ric Williams brings you his review of it.

Reissues

In The Kindermann Depiction, Physical Plant Theater's Steve Moore and director Carlos Trevino have created two worlds, one flooded with leaves, one made of cloth, that are full of strange wonders. We wouldn't want to live there; but our lives are much enriched by having paid a visit.

Former Austinite George Ratliff returns to town with his new documentary, Hell House, which explores the Trinity Church's way of converting teens to Christ -- by scaring the pants off them.

Experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin is down on corporatization and up with aliens, presenting a compilation of his work at the Blue Theater's Blue Screen series.

Texas Platters

SXSW Records

Director Guillermo del Toro keeps company with the undead in two new films, Blade 2 and The Devil's Backbone.

In its staging of Judith Thompson's play Lion in the Streets, the tale of a ghostly girl who wanders the streets searching for her life, Kia Productions mines some deep material, with a passionate cast that takes the work to the edge -- and sometimes, unfortunately, too far over it.

Upcoming events in Austin's literary scene

In Austin Lyric Opera's production of the opera A Streetcar Named Desire, director Brad Dalton and his design team translate the unsettled mental state of Blanche Dubois into literal elements of the setting, creating a distorted, exaggerated, haunted work.