Dallas International Film Festival released the first 10 films of its lineup on Monday and we’re liking the way it looks so far. Among the films announced is a flick produced by local Lascaux films called Words and Pictures , the world premiere of a movie starring Nick Offerman, and…
Several weeks back I listened to two long, in-depth interviews with the actor and comedian Will Forte, one with Chris Hardwick and one with Marc Maron. Forte was charming and silly and is apparently unlucky in love, a family man worried he’ll never have a family, and he’s profoundly weird…
WES from Alejandro Prullansky on Vimeo. If you’re into movies with smart characters who secretly feel shunned by society and scenes with supremely low frame rates, you’re in luck. The Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson is having a mini-film fest of director Wes Anderson’s films all next week. The Drafthouse’s “Week…
Morning news shows have to fill a lot of time for audiences who are barely awake or so hungover that they don’t realize the TV is actually on, so they have a little more leeway with their content. That’s why you’ve never seen folks like Brian Williams doing cooking segments…
Action heroes with nothing to lose are the best kind, perhaps the only kind worth watching. In the opening seconds of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop, Liam Neeson’s federal air marshal Bill Marks slumps in his parked vehicle, sloshing a few glugs of whiskey into a paper cup and stirring it up…
In 1998, Douglas Adams published a sweet, funny essay called “Riding the Rays,” about an excursion to Hayman Island to try a kind of underwater jet ski device called a Sub Bug because it afforded an opportunity to swim with manta rays. He wrote of his encounter with the creature:…
First, let’s get this out of the way: There is no Santa Claus. Now, on to a perhaps even harsher truth: There are certain indications that Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose 17th-century paintings — like Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Music Lesson — show an extraordinarily delicate touch…
The corpse lay crumpled on the conference table, close enough that the studio executive could tug on the red heel of her Louboutins. She’d been lying there unnoticed, or perhaps just ignored, for quite some time. Her wedding veil was tattered and someone had spilled coffee on her white satin…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t … or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric home video…
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…
The Oscars are coming! Yay! I haven’t seen any of the movies, on account of the stupid infant and his inability to take care of himself for three hours, so I have no idea which new movies are the best new movies. I also have no idea what the outside…
Jay Leno must be lonely. What has Jay Leno been doing the last couple weeks?
In film after film from the late ’70s into the mid-’80s, the slobs — often led by writer-director-actor Harold Ramis, who died today at age 69 — trounced the snobs in each of their face-offs: at Faber College, at Camp North Star, at Sergeant Hulka’s Fort Arnold, against that ginger…
“Over the weekend, I won my first air sex competition,” says Steven Walters, gleefully lighting a cigarette. “I even beat out a sexy pole dancer.” It’s a sunny Monday afternoon in February and I’m sitting next to Walters on a bench outside of Crooked Tree Coffeehouse in Uptown. The busy…
Almost a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, In Secret boasts vigor and…
No matter what else he does, director Sam Raimi has two unassailable fan favorites under his belt: 1987’s Evil Dead 2, and the 1992 trilogy-capper Army of Darkness. (His first film, 1981’s The Evil Dead, is more “respected” than “loved” by the fans.) Released between those two films, Raimi’s 1990…
It doesn’t feature iPhones, Twitter or an internet, and yet Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop remains perhaps the most prescient sci-fi effort of the past 30 years — a work from 1987 whose continuing relevance is matched by the fact that no one would dare make it today. Or, at least, remake…
Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…
In 1990, the same year that Kevin Costner released the massive global hit Dances with Wolves, a curious thing happened in France. The name Kevin became the country’s most popular for new babies, a Gaelic moniker edging out national stalwarts like Antoine and Jules. Imagine if everyone in America suddenly…
The man who gifted the world with splatter-soaked classics like Surf Nazis Must Die, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and The Toxic Avenger isn’t just bringing back one of his most classic franchises. He’s also bringing it to the Texas Theatre. The Oak Cliff movie house announced that Troma…
Actor, writer and director Crispin Glover owns an interesting piece of real estate in between the realms of independent cinema and pop culture. The lanky legend has pulled off brilliant performances in memorable, mainstream movies such as the one-armed bellhop in Hot Tub Time Machine, the conniving “Thin Man” in…
It’s a little sad that Colin Farrell has outgrown roles that require him to wear raggedy sweaters and say things like “For fook’s sake!” It had to happen, though. Farrell has always made a terrific bad boy, but he clearly knows he couldn’t be a scamp forever, and he seems…
