Take 5

Artsy avenues: Winnipeg’s cultural connoisseurs tend to cluster on certain streets

It’s been joked that if your local bars start pushing beer that tastes like pennies and orange peels, you know your rent’s about to go up.

Apparently, gentrification can be measured in International Bitterness Units and the number of breweries run by bushy beards in your neighbourhood.

The scenester, the hipster, the boho — or whatever other names are given to the artsy farts and creative entrepreneurs newly arrived to urban from suburban life — and the culture they bring will continue to attract jabs and ambivalence as people argue over how neighbourhoods evolve healthily.

Nevertheless, our city’s pockets of nightlife, live music and local art are precious, complex, proudly touted by Winnipeggers — and animated by young creatives. These pockets are key among the reasons Winnipeg punches above its weight culturally; without them, the city would be a much duller place.

Toast St. Paddy with TV, books that celebrate the Emerald Isle

In time for St. Patrick's Day, take any of these five suggestions to get a dose of Irish spirit.

Carol Shields’ airport vignettes set to take off again

The first play by one of Manitoba’s finest writers is scheduled for a return flight to local stages this weekend, with the Shoestring Players bringing Carol Shields’ Departures and Arrivals to the Forrest Nickerson Theatre.

Five things to check out during Winnipeg’s annual winter party Festival du Voyageur

Take 5: In a regular series, the Free Press explores five great things

Festival du Voyageur is celebrating 57 years of paying homage to the history of francophones, Métis and First Nations in Manitoba.

Headquartered at Whittier Park in St. Boniface, with other events at a host of indoor sites, the festival opens Friday and runs to Feb. 20, featuring a wealth of activities, music and art inspired by the voyageur era of the early 1800s.

Below are five ways to find your joie de vivre during the festival; tickets are available at heho.ca, where you can also download a handy app.

A strange brew of Canadians has joined Bob and Doug Mackenzie in their hoserdom

Every culture has versions of the picaresque hero: part myth, part social descriptor. The archetypal underdog, the lovable rogue of low social origin who outwiles the elite and powerful. In Canada, we could do worse than the hoser.

The prisoner’s dilemma: Familiar formula makes thrilling cinema

People talk about prison films, but they don’t talk about prisoner’s dilemma movies. Yet hundreds, probably thousands, of films are structured around a prisoner’s dilemma.

A selection of horror, dread and other terrifically creepy tales

The spooky season is in full swing, with every streaming service worth its salt suggesting films that go bump in the night. A scary movie is a great date night, but we suggest burning the midnight oil with one of these gripping, ghoulish reads.

From classic chillers to frightful new fiction, these terrific terror tomes will have you sleeping with the light on.

Mongrels: A NovelBy Stephen Graham Jones

Canadian horror picks with slashed budgets, killer scores

Canadian films, at least outside Quebec, don’t get enough love.

Lo-fi grit, unrefined performances and other rough edges often take on an endearing quality in Canadian music.

In film, they tend to trigger a deadly label: “amateurish.”

However, there’s at least one movie genre where amateurism, when it happens, feels appealingly punk, and that’s horror.

Artists, performers open their doors, and their souls, for Culture Days

Culture Days, a national celebration of local arts and culture, kicks off today and runs through Oct. 12.

There are hundreds of free public events taking place across Manitoba over the next three weeks, including in Winnipeg, Morden, Gimli, Flin Flon and beyond. Nuit Blanche Winnipeg, the city’s annual late-night art party, also falls under the Culture Days umbrella and takes place Sept. 27.

Find a sample of the fun below and visit culturedays.ca for more information.

Central Park Moves: Weekend BeatsCentral Park, 367 Ellice Ave.

Underrated true crime gems deliver tawdry, crowd-pleasing thrills

One of the defining conflicts of our era is liberalism versus populism: tricky “elites” in labs, newsrooms and political halls against the salt-of-the-earth know-nothings who try to expose their agenda.

However much these stereotypes hold water, what better snapshot of the clash between professional and everyday opinion than Rotten Tomatoes scores?

And is there a fiercer battleground between the Popcornmeter and the Tomatometer — between the masses and critics — than with true-crime shows?

While audiences lap up stories about a man secretly living in his ex-girlfriend’s attic, a serial killer turning his murders into bestselling “fiction” and a father faking a kidnapping-by-air-balloon of his son (yes, all real true-crime premises) — critics often plug their nose and finger-wag.

A look at some of the ’90s best thrillers

We are so back.

Or that’s what the kids keep saying online.

And one of the things that’s back is gen X culture, at least in a selective way.

We’re told that fashion is cyclical, which partially means that kids make a show of rebelling against their parents while also dusting off and throwing on their records and threads.

Pop goes the world: Looking back at moments that helped define 2024

There was no shortage of pop culture this year. Here, we look at five of the moments that defined 2024.

Forget the same old holiday music and check out some new local treats

We’ve built a list of Manitoba Christmas tunes that we hope will fill humbuggers’ and Hallmarkers’ hearts alike with yuletide cheer.