It probably sounds completely obvious that for the past two days the repeating theme seemed to be creativity. Because, well, naturally, films are creative endeavors. But the documentaries and features (three of four, anyway) centered around creative people — big-time ones, indie ones and “What the hell do I do…
Let the rest of the world bitch about Hump Day, you’re taking a bit of You Time and cozying up with the best independent cinema this side of the Mason/Dixon. Whether you’ve joined the Occupy DIFF movement or just plan to grab a casual post-work seat, we think you’ll like…
Much as you’d like to catch all 160 titles at this year’s DIFF, scheduling (and life) make it impossible, so you have to learn to pick, choose and hope you get awesome results. Leaning from Sunday’s mistakes (yeah, I’m looking at you, Bringing Up Bobby), I went with two Faust…
If you’ve been camping out in theaters for the last five days with your G Chat set to “unavailable”, we salute you. Living la vida DIFF isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach for that matter. I’m curious: what’s the largetst thing you’ve smuggled into a theater by now?…
The best part of having experienced your Big Film Fail in the first weekend of DIFF is knowing that you’ve gotten major disappointment out of the way and you can now just sit back, relax, and finish out on a high note. Maybe the note won’t be quite as high…
We love film here at the Observer, so this year we dispatched our finest stringers to chronicle what they’ve seen and guide you through the Dallas International Film Festival. Touch base for daily reviews by Merritt Martin, Jennifer Medina and James Wallace. Movie fans are damn happy that we live…
Are you a die-hard, complete immersion festie? Did you take the week off of work so that you’d be able to see all of these great movies? We salute you. Whether you’re planted in those seats from beginning to end, or just catching what you can this evening, we’ve got…
It’s the perfect day to hunker down at DIFF, so our staff crunched the schedule and created a game plan. Here’s your guide to today’s indies, docs and features. Click the film titles for background information…
The Dallas 2012 Dallas International Film Festival kicks off its boots tomorrow and starts that film ferris wheel a-rolling for 11 days of features, docs, shorts, animated films, awards, Q&As, talk shows, panels and of course plenty of star spotting and people watching (it is Dallas after all). Here are…
At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really. The real spoilers in the film are in the tricky mechanics crafted by writers Joss Whedon…
The latest phantasmagoria of cinematic quotation from Canadian director Guy Maddin, Keyhole is an extremely loose adaptation of the Odyssey. Jason Patric plays Ulysses Pick, leader of a two-bit gang who, carrying a nearly drowned girl on his back, returns home after a long absence. With his criminal accomplices confined…
Before he directed the comic-lover’s box set staple, the Spider-Man trilogy, Sam Raimi was a low-budget collaborator. We are all better humans because of this. Had he never been an errant hair in the film industry’s arm pit we wouldn’t have Evil Dead I and II, and “boom stick” wouldn’t…
It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been more than a decade since my mom bought my friends and I tickets to American Pie, on accounts of us being freshman in high school at the time and unable to see anything on our own that had two boobies and…
A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the Wind-style cinematic event that the millennials could call their own. Now Titanic has bobbed to the surface yet again in a 3-D re-release, making a play for an audience…
The Kid With a Bike, the new film from Belgian art-house legends Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, begins with Cyril, a scrappy 11-year-old living in an urban orphanage and making what is apparently his umpteenth unsuccessful attempt to reach his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier) by phone. Dad promised to come back…
Lean, fast-moving and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans’ Indonesian martial arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype and the buzz it generated at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a fortysomething Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his sixtysomething father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
Every week Texas Theatre finds a truly terrible movie and screens it as Tuesday Night Trash. Tonight’s selection, Samurai Cop, is the warm gum stuck to the loafer of Hollywood producer Amir Shervan. Try as he might to scrape it off on a rock, evidence of its existence will live…
Hold your hats and get ready to DIFF. Dallas International Film Festival begins on April 12 but started its roundtable discussions this afternoon at Private Social with Sironia’s Thomas Ward (screenwriter, actor) and Brendon Dickerson (director, writer). “Career suicide” is the exact phrase used by Dickerson’s Los Angeles friends when…
Between The Hulk screaming at our faces in 3-D and Batman possibly breaking his spine in IMAX, it’s going to be a fairly epic year in blockbuster cinema. Yet, if you’re scheduling your year of movie patronage based solely on the trailers (and not the incessant Rotten Tomatoes picking), then…
Do you love frenetic, high-flying gun-slinging, sword-slashing Asian cinema? Well, we’ve got what you crave. Mixmaster is giving away a pair of tickets for tomorrow’s (Friday, March 22) 8:15 p.m. screening of Let The Bullets Fly. This new release by Vendetta Films stars action guru Chow Yun Fat. Here’s the…
“If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’ astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
