As lights pulsed from purple to green to blue, a woman in tall boots, a black dress and curls out past her shoulders traced the notes she was singing with her finger in the air. Her crescendos elicited approving calls from the audience. She is a powerhouse frontwoman. Her audience is her congregation and she is the pastor. Self-described tent-revival musician Danielle Ponder revived audiences at Funk ’N Waffles Downtown on Friday night. Her band, Danielle Ponder and the Tomor

Normal 12-year-old boys trade baseball cards, swap Pokémon, or bargain chips for cookies for fun. Joselito de la Cruz trades windshield washing tools out of necessity. Joselito, who prefers the name Jeffrey because it sounds American, is the enchanting boy from Santo Domingo in Yanillys Perez’s feature documentary “Jeffrey.” To support his family, Jeffrey washes windshields at a stoplight in Santo Domingo. When he isn’t working to pay his mother’s rent, or playing caretaker f

On May 30, 2016, Hissein Habré, the former dictator of Chad, was convicted for crimes against humanity. His offenses include rape, sexual slavery, torture and ordering the killing of more than 40,000 people during his rule from 1982 to 1990. Through the documentary “Hissein Habré, A Chadian Tragedy,” director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun gives Habré’s victims power of their own to talk about their physical and emotional trauma, and their tumultuous paths through grief. Their stories

Screenshot from "Interchange" trailer Malaysian film “Interchange” from writer-director Dain Iskandar Said is an experiment testing how many plot twists can be packed into one film. The plot of this Malanglish-noir film rapidly devolves into a maelstrom of “ah ha” moments the audience is not privy to. Instead, anyone outside the film’s inner- circle of humanoid birds, ritual killers and intellectually questionable detectives is left with a hopelessly tangled mess of entrails—

Performers asked their audience to “attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” at the Glimmerglass Festival. What they were really asking, though, was for the audience to attend the tale of a 1960-something church congregation putting on a production of Sweeney Todd in the church’s plain, unremarkable basement. Sondheim describes his show, “Sweeney,” as “melodramatic with a big ‘m.’” Emotions run high, blood is nearly its own character and the story is rather outrageous. The set for “S

Music isn’t what it used to be. Men aren’t asking Barbra Ann to hold their hands and quartets of women no longer beg the postman to deliver letters from their boyfriends so far away. Instead, music has permeated into comedy and the “musician/comedian” performers are taking the stage. These artists, like Matt Griffo, have created new songs with lyrics along the lines of “sit on my face and tell me you love me” and “let’s all drink our bottled water and put the Earth aslaughter