“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
The true heart of Michael Mann’s Heat is revealed a little more than an hour into the film. No, I’m not talking about the classic coffee conversation between Robert De Niro’s master thief, Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino’s obsessed LAPD cop, Vincent Hanna — that fantastic and immortal face-off comes…
As the Oak Cliff Film Festival enters its sixth year, you see it growing into its future. Filmmaker friends of the festival have become more established, giving the content added weight – along with highly anticipated regional and statewide premieres. Left-of-center visionaries keep a revolving seat at the table for…
A committed (and controversial) performance from Elle Fanning as a high school kid born Ramona — but identifying as Ray — is diced up and short-shrifted in this muddled comedy-drama. The title suggests the chief trouble: Director and co-writer Gaby Dellal’s attention is divided among three generations, with Ray’s mother…
America is going to hate this movie. Doug Liman’s The Wall — whose title will forever demand that, when bringing up the film in conversation, you’ll have to say, “No, the other Wall” — is a mean little thriller set in our desert wars, and its only American soldiers are…
Contractors who’ll soon be hired to renovate the 112-year-old Ambassador Hotel are strongly advised to brace themselves before they open the closets. They might find charred human remains or a foot-long prosthetic penis. For three weeks beginning mid-March, the hotel’s carpeted hallways were showered with blood from cannons being fired…
Serial Mom is available in a new Blu-ray edition from Shout Factory. John Waters’ response to boxes — the kind in which we tend to place others and ourselves — is to vomit on them. And then sell them, his pencil-thin mustache twisting in a good-humored smirk. Throughout his career…
Sugarland native Allison Tolman didn’t plan on turning Dallas into her first professional home as an actress. “It kind of became the plan,” Tolman says with a laugh. The 2004 Baylor University graduate had just gone on a national tour with a children’s theater company as her first job out…
It’s April 1992, and ABC commentator Judith Miller’s voice has an exasperated tinge as she reports to her audience that not one of the officers who beat Rodney King on that infamous videotape has been found guilty of any charges. Soon, riots break out in Los Angeles. Thousands of stores…
Steve Coogan is at a fancy dinner, but he’s not doing any Michael Caine impressions. Instead, he’s brooding with resentment of his workaholic congressman brother, Stan (Richard Gere), and grappling with the realization that his son might be a psychopath. It’s all supposed to be harrowing, and the British comedian…
Dear White People streams on Netflix For the past half-century, college campuses have served as a primary theater of the culture wars. So it’s fitting that one of the year’s most provocative, timely, searching, intellectually prickly, and ultimately satisfying series takes place at a university. Netflix’s Dear White People, which…
The celebrity appearance roster for this year’s Texas Frightmare Weekend reads like a list of patron saints for the Church of Horror Fan Worship. However, three notable names have excommunicated themselves from the list. Three of the child actors from Netflix’s runaway horror series hit Stranger Things, including Gaten Matarazzo,…
After The Fate of the Furious premiered, talk of that franchise’s ever slicker, more over-the-top future turned to the promise (and hope) of F&F jumping the shark right into space. But what if … it was already there? And it was named, instead, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2? In…
It’s May, and we’re all still standing! Thank you, television! I was gonna add that May is looking up, but then I noticed there’s a three-hour long Carpool Karaoke special, so instead I’ll just say that May has some growing up to do, and leave it at that. Let us…
This May 4th, known affectionately to Star Wars fans as May the Fourth Be With You, may be a conflicting one for sci-fi aficionados. On that day, a new Guardians of the Galaxy film will be released to theaters. But people in Dallas-Fort Worth haven’t forgotten about the sci-fi franchise…
Not long before the surprisingly violent finale of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Melanie Griffith’s wild girl-turned-good-girl-turned-complicated-girl Audrey asks Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a straight-arrow-Wall-Streeter-turned-desperate-romantic-turned-man-of-action, “What are you gonna do now that you know how the other half lives?” “The other half?” he asks, confused. “The other half of you.” The…
Nancy Cartwright will speak Friday, April 28, at the USA Film Festival Actress and writer Nancy Cartwright may have one of the most lucrative voice-acting careers in the history of entertainment, but that doesn’t mean her wandering days are over. The Ohio native turned Californian, best known as the voice…
The cornucopia of amateur porn known as HUMP! will grace the Texas Theatre this weekend. Now in its 12th year, the festival is the brainchild – nay, lovechild – of Dan Savage, the writer behind the Savage Love column. Every film at HUMP! has, at minimum, two things in common: For one,…
It’s easy to giggle at The Circle, the movie, just as it’s easy giggle sometimes at Dave Eggers, whose novel is the film’s source. James Ponsoldt’s adaptation (co-written with Eggers) is, like Eggers’ books, nakedly earnest, engaged with nothing less but The State of Things Now, more smart than its…
The Handmaid’s Tale premieres April 26 on Hulu In the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood herself shows up to slap our heroine in the face. The grande dame of dystopian fiction plays an aunt, one of the abbesses in charge of a new order of so-called handmaids:…
Twice I’ve described Kitty Green’s curious, alienating docu-whatzit Casting JonBenet to friends, and twice I’ve been asked, with surprising heat, “Why?” and “What’s the point?” So, this time, before we get into the specifics of what this documentary actually documents, let’s take a moment to consider what the film isn’t…
