In June 2011, Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse theater chain boldly transformed a customer complaint into a provocative piece of advertising. The ad in question became one of the no talking-no texting PSAs the chain runs before movies, and it features a profanity-laden rant from a female customer who was asked to…
Last month we gave you “Your July Guide to Dallas’ Free Outdoor Movies. You’re Welcome, Cheapskate.” Well, July’s come and gone, and it’s effing hot. It’s time to move the free movie screenings indoors. With beer. But not free beer…
We’ve all collectively scanned a block of text and clicked on the “agree” button before thoroughly reading through the terms and conditions for iTunes, Google, Facebook, and other massive corporations to whom we willingly give our personal info. What’s in the fine print and what happens after we click is…
With Alamo Drafthouse’s first DFW location opening this week, we talked to their creative manager, James Wallace. Those in the Dallas film community will know Wallace from Gordon & the Whale, a movie website that trafficked in reviews and advance screening, and following that, I Heart Cinema. He has also…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema’s capacity for inquiry, confrontation and remembrance…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy,…
The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grown-ups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star–two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex into their…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways—and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh and in others…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
Shout!FactoryThe cast of Fridays Whether you love it or hate it these days, it’s still tough to compete against Saturday Night Live. Although the show certainly has seen much better and much funnier days, you still can’t knock it off its perch after all these years. The powers that be…
As we’ve previously reported, Halt & Catch Fire is the product of Plano native Chris Cantwell, and it focuses the personal computing boom of the 1980s in tech-rich Dallas. The show filmed a pilot for AMC this year, and even fixed up a the iconic Neon Big Tex sign on…
The lobby in Richardson’s new Alamo Drafthouse is still just bare concrete and metal, but they’ve already held what would, for any other theater, be an event almost impossible to top. Starting at seven, over two hundred lucky contest winners were ushered inside to an intimate auditorium decked out with…
The above trailer is for an actual movie about old guys partying in Vegas, coming to your local cineplex on November 1. (Sample joke: “Do you have any drugs?” “Does Lipitor count?”) (Sample reaction: throws self into nearest sinkhole.) But Last Vegas isn’t the last Vegas movie coming your way…
Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but that will no doubt…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era — a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine — bony, loping, a little shaggy — and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and…
Liz OhanesianJ.G. Quintel, creator of Regular Show, left, meets Muscle Man come to life. J.G. Quintel has been going to San Diego Comic-Con for a decade now. He started out his journey here as a fan, a CalArts student who caught wind of the event from his brother. Quintel would…
Update: We’ve been asking for your SyFy film suggestions today and I gotta say: I’d greenlight all of these. Check out our favorite reader’s ideas for new Sharknado follow-up projects. They’re at the bottom. I love crap. According to trending polls, you do too. Case in point: rip-off monster movie…
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a BART transit officer. The officer later claimed that he meant to reach for his Taser and…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
