Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel that Sophie had been writing, which…

Crispin Glover Gave A Bizarre Performance at Texas Theatre This Weekend

Most people know Crispin Glover as Marty McFly’s father, the Thin Man in Charlie’s Angels or Willard, the rat loving psychopath. What he isn’t known for is performance art. Until now. Glover has been touring the world with his wildly weird two-night, one-man show, Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show,…

Tonight on CMT, Texas Women Start Embarrassing Us

Here’s what reality TV does: It takes the worst stereotypes about places and people and rolls them up into one big awful stereotype and then it makes a show about how “real” it is. Meet Texas Women, a new reality series premiering tonight at 9 p.m. on cable’s CMT channel…

The Best and Worst of Oprah’s Season 25: Behind the Scenes

Lately, my evenings have been filled with DVR sessions of the Oprah Winfrey Network, and more specifically, with Season 25: Behind the Scenes, the reality program chronicling the backstage business of the mogul’s final season of her syndicated talk show. I’m far from being an Oprah drone, but that is…

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

After 10 years and seven movies, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. It’s a climax of truly epic proportions, not only for its narrative import but for the fact that it…

What the Hell Has TV Done to Real Housewives?

Does Jill Zarin have anything in common with June Cleaver? If you watch any of the Real Housewives shows on Bravo, you have to wonder if kids are growing up now not knowing what a “housewife” is. June Cleaver, if you don’t remember black and white TV, was Beaver and…

Not Just Gossip, Brian J. Smith Added to Cast of Gossip Girl

We’ve been following the work of actor Brian J. Smith since he was a student at Plano’s Collin College, so it’s a kick to see that he’s been cast as Blake Lively’s new love interest on the TV series Gossip Girl. A graduate of The Juilliard School, Smith grew up…

Horrible Bosses Sings the White Man’s Lament

There’s a scene in Horrible Bosses in which Jennifer Aniston, playing a dentist who habitually sexually harasses her weakling male hygienist (Charlie Day), repeatedly says the word “pussy.” Her character is trying to intimidate his, while the filmmakers attempt to shock the audience with the spectacle of this lady rom-com…

Can Dr. Drew Cure Cable News’ Addiction?

Now that the Casey Anthony case is over — not guilty on all murder counts, guilty only of four misdemeanors — will cable news be able to give it up? More specifically, will Dr. Drew? This case has become cable news’ hillbilly heroin and it’ll be hard for them to…

Larry Crowne: Unbelievable Lightness of Being

For a movie called Larry Crowne, it sure is tough to get a solid read on the character of Larry Crowne. Directed, co-written by and starring Tom Hanks in that title role, the film seems to want to be some kind of post-recessional pick-me-up, an “It Gets Better” video for…

Transformers: Baying at the Moon

The two hours and 34 minutes of Transformers: Dark of the Moon are loaded with unimaginable violence, but only one spasm left the audience speechless at the theater where I watched it. They cheered the robot-on-robot slugfests, rendered in terabyte-straining slow motion and splashing Decepticon blood (oil?). The destruction of…

Filmmobile Brings Free Film Screenings And Workshops To The Kessler

We suppose you could call it a drive-up movie theater. This Friday, the Filmmobile, a straight-outta-LA school bus catering to all things cinematic, sets up shop outside the Kessler Theatre for a night of solar-powered film screenings, live music, and bingo under the stars. Currently in the midst of a…

Bad Teacher and the Downside of Equal Rights in Hollywood

From Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Anna Faris (which Jezebel.com reblogged under the headline “Hollywood Insiders Admit Hollywood Hates Women”) to the glass-ceiling-shattering pressure assigned to last month’s Bridesmaids (which has thus far outgrossed every previous Judd Apatow project since Knocked Up), a case could be made that 2011…

Buck: Horse Whisperer Speaks Up

The documentary Audience Award winner at this year’s Sundance festival, Buck follows itinerant horse trainer Buck Brannaman as he applies his uniquely humane and frankly astounding methods in four-day clinics around the country. If that sounds as exciting as watching hay turn yellow, director Cindy Meehl finds the real story…

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop: Try Harder

“I am angry,” Conan O’Brien admits in Rodman Flender’s tour doc Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. “I’m trying not to be…but sometimes I’m so mad I can’t even breathe.” Prohibited from appearing on television for six months after his early 2010 break with NBC, Conan hit the road, capitalizing on his…

Cars 2: Life in the Breakdown Lane

Pixar’s Cars franchise takes a sharp turn from NASCAR mayhem and red-state-targeted ’50s nostalgia to 007 espionage with the upgraded sequel Cars 2, though in its delivery of Matchbox-machine superheroics for its young male demographic, it stays true to its prime function as an advertising vehicle for merchandise. Nonetheless, if…