Weekend Event Planner

Top things to do in Houston this weekend: arcade expo, Honeyland fest, and tree lighting spectacular

Galleria Ice Spectacular Nov 2015 Santa and skater

It begins to look a lot like Christmas at The Galleria this weekend.

Photo courtesy of Dave Rossman

The holidays arrive in Houston this weekend with the big lighting of the Galleria Christmas tree. Before that, though, there's a big film festival, an arcade expo, a show by a hit comedian, and much more.

Below are more best ways to spend your precious free time this weekend. Want more options? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, November 9

Houston Cinema Arts Festival
The Houston Cinema Arts Festival will screen/premiere short films and feature length movies from Houston and around the world. Highlights include opening night film Lost Soulz; a 25th anniversary screening of Rushmore; The Herricanes, about 1970s women's football team Houston Herricanes; and more. Screenings will take place at multiple venues, including the DeLUXE Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Rooftop Cinema Club. For the full schedule, go to the festival website. 7 pm. (12:30 pm Saturday; Noon Sunday).

Friday, November 10

2023 Houston Arcade Expo
Expect a weekend of fun and free play as The Houston Area Arcade Group (HAAG) is holding its 20th Annual Arcade Expo. There will be hundreds of classic and current coin-op pinball machines, video arcade games, penny arcades, and console video games ready for attendees to play on free play or buy them for their home. There will also be tournaments, events, music and workshops to keep the young (and young at heart) entertained. Noon (10 am Saturday and Sunday).

Reeves Art + Design presents "Terry Suprean: Futurescapes" opening reception
In "Futurescapes," a solo exhibition of new paintings by Terry Suprean, the artist presents a large and diverse body of work utilizing the experimental artist-manufactured paints he has developed and worked with over the last decade to mimic and mirror geological processes, engage with the language of abstraction in the digital age, and probe the meaning of landscape painting in the Anthropocene. Through Thursday, November 30. 6 pm.

DACAMERA presents Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones with the E-Collective and Turtle Island Quartet
Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones made history in 2021 as the first opera written by a Black composer to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera. This “opera in jazz” tells the true coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in the face of great adversity and forging his personal identity. Now, Blanchard presents a new suite of music from the opera, performed by the celebrated trumpeter and his E-Collective, the Grammy-winning Turtle Island Quartet, and vocalists Nicholas Newton and Adrienne Danrich. 8 pm.

Saturday, November 11

Canstruction and Houston Food Bank presents Canstruction Houston
Canstruction Houston is an annual design-build event that benefits the Houston Food Bank and features top Houston architects, engineers, designers, contractors, and mentored students from across greater Houston. They will showcase their talents and creativity by building can-structures that range from replicas of iconic Houston landmarks to popular locations around the globe to favorite characters in pop culture. Through Sunday, November 19. 8 am.

The Galleria presents 34th Annual Tree Lighting and Ice Spectacular
The Galleria's 34th Annual Ice Spectacular will kick off the holiday season with the lighting of its 55-foot Christmas tree, featuring 450,000 twinkling lights and 5,000 ornaments in a variety of colors and shapes. A time-honored holiday tradition, the 45-minute tree-lighting show will feature a performance by The Voice Season 21 contestant Jershika Maple. The event will culminate with the lighting of the tree by Skating Santa and a fireworks display. Noon.

Honeyland Festival
Honeyland is a festival celebrating the best of Black expression, where the top restaurateurs, beverage makers, and artists get together to remix, refresh, and create more of what ﬂavors the world. The two-day fest is led by food curator Marcus Samuelsson, spirits curator Fawn Weaver, and Houston ambassador Tobe Nwigwe. The music side of the event will feature performances by Nwigwe, Mary J. Blige, Miguel, Jazmine Sullivan, Tems, Lucky Dave, Chloe, Coco Jones, Scarface, Slim Thug, Paul Wall, and more. Noon.

Sunday, November 12

PrintHouston presents Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints
PrintHouston’s biennial Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints returns. The event will feature approximately 50 artists from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New York, and London. Each artist will bring a carved 3’ x 5’ woodblock, which will be inked and printed using a two-ton steamroller as a printing press. PrintHouston’s first From Press to Table print fair will also be held on Sunday, in tandem with the Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints event. Kids will have their own space and inked up board to ride bikes and skateboards over to create monotypes. 10 am.

Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land presents Ali Wong
Ali Wong is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actress. She’s best known for her two hit Netflix specials, Baby Cobra, Hard Knock Wife, and Don Wong. Wong has done a lot for Netflix: she voiced the co-lead and executive-produced the animated comedy Tuca and Bertie, alongside Tiffany Haddish; starred in the movie Always Be My Maybe, which she co-wrote with longtime friend and creative collaborator Randall Park; and executive-produced the dark comedy Beef, where she co-starred with Steven Yeun. 8 pm.

Movie Review

New horror movie Faces of Death puts a modern twist on cult classic

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy — in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks — is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

movies film