Walking into Texas Theatre last night, my friends and I formed an unlikely alliance. A Cathy cartoon, flamingo and Shari Lewis abandoned East Dallas for Oak Cliff, largely thanks to a curious week of Instagram photos spit out by the resurrected art house. They were really hyping this screening of…
One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances…
She was a lonely princess. He was a cocky civilian. And after she escaped the palace, the unlikely couple fell in love. It’s the plot of Roman Holiday and — according to this soapy romance from director Oliver Hirschbiegel — the true-enough story of the last two years of Princess…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best…
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges. Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers…
Last April Price is Right Live! announced the game show would visit the Majestic. We called in sick to our jobs, using the time to intensively study price points of common consumer goods — blenders, dreaded dinette sets, sexytime hot tubs and jet skis — so that victory would be…
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana…
Think Little Miss Sunshine could have used an elastic penis? Behold: Bad Grandpa, in which a widower and an eight-year-old drive across the country hitting on chicks, farting in diners, and getting granddad’s manhood stuck in a vending machine before sending the boy out in drag to perform a striptease…
Although first viewings of most films should be experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible, few benefit as much from walking in cold as The Wicker Man. Newly restored in a “final cut” that’s apparently what the filmmaker originally put together before the distributor trimmed it down for double…
This Saturday and Sunday Texas Theatre will be home to all manner of low-budget shocks and splatters. The DOA Bloodbath Film Festival is back for its fifth year, celebrating the Halloween season with independent horror films from around the world. At a glance one would assume that DOA stands for…
Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
The Lone Star Film Society has announced the lineup for its seventh annual film festival and its poised to be their biggest year yet. Along with big names like The Book Thief, directed by Brian Percival of Downton Abbey fame, and studios like Fox and Sony Classic Pictures, the 2013…
Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor, Dickensian beanpole and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear that Cumberbatch would be…
What’s illegal at Disneyland? Dogs, drugs, alcohol, pamphlets, flags and large coolers. Not listed? Secretly shooting a feature-length movie. But Disneyland couldn’t have imagined director Randy Moore would have the courage to film Escape From Tomorrow on location — and that it would be so horny. In the black-and-white theme…
Kimberly Peirce changes almost nothing in her rallying remake of Brian De Palma’s classic about a troubled telekinetic teenager. She doesn’t have to. Yes, now the mean girls who pelt Carrie with tampons upload a cell phone video of the attack, and the well-meaning jock who squires the school outcast…
We love a good movie making contest, as evidenced by the Observer’s critically *acclaimed, *award-winning entry in the 24 Hour Video Race (shown above). Well there’s a new challenge on the table, divined through the intoxicated holy union of the Oak Cliff Film Festival and Four Corners Brewery. It’s called…
Alamo founder and reigning sheriff of Movie Town etiquette, Tim League, scolded Madonna on Twitter Sunday, banning her from all Alamo Drafthouse locations. It was a response to a Daily Mail story that said the pop star was texting aggressively during the NYFF screening of Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A…
What are we to do without the nail-biting, stress-inducing, emotional roller coaster of Breaking Bad? Why, tune into the flesh-biting, stress-inducing, emotional rollercoaster of Walking Dead, of course. Walter White meet Rick Grimes. He’s not afraid to cry. And we drink to that. In fact, we drink to everything. We…
Tom Hanks has built a career out of playing aggressively noble roles, so it’s only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it’s no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’ true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander…
