A chance conversation with a few of my friends occurred earlier this week. We’d skirted around talking about our lives, our jobs or what was going on in the rest of the country, to instead discuss Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao, otherwise known as “The Fight of The Century” or…
Avengers: Age of Ultron director and screenwriter Joss Whedon wants to give us everything in his movie, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat, writes LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson in her review of the film, which opens May 1. Joining her on…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies and at least 10 films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity…
I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. “You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up — and started churning out indie movies justifying why not.” In the ’40s, men fought wars at 18. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock…
Author J.K. Rowling’s rags-to-riches biography is arguably better known than her most famous creation, Harry Potter. As the oft-repeated origin story goes, Rowling was a single mother making ends meet, aided by government assistance while she was scribbling the first installment of her phenomenally successful fantasy series in a café…
After David Vobora arrived back home in Dallas after a week in the Bermuda Triangle, he consumed 13,000 calories in 24 hours. He had just spent a week filming for a man versus water-type reality show called The Raft for National Geographic. The concept is essentially where he and one…
There aren’t many people worth traveling more than 1,000 miles for. Maybe the president of the United States, maybe your child you’ve never met, or maybe a resurrected John Lennon. But a former Bachelor contestant?…
The first ever WhoFest kicked off last year at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Addison on the same weekend as the BBC’s official American premiere of the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor. The episode brought back every single incarnation of the Doctor and turned a flooded conference…
If you’re a huge movie fan, you’ve got at least one filmmaker in mind that you would just love to sit down with just for a few minutes and root around their brain like someone looking for a contact lens in a Hardee’s dumpster. Well, the odds are pretty good…
UnfriendedOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the way…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time intensely, but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change…
It’s nearly impossible to persuade the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catch-all for “really expensive clothes,” as it’s commonly misunderstood, but a specific term for clothes made entirely by hand, for a specific…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
They say when one door closes, another one opens. Well, in the case of big D film festivals, when one ends its yearly run, another begins. Starting on Wednesday at The Angelika in Dallas, the USA Film Festival will open for its 2015 showcase of Texas and American independent films…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
If you’ve ever played music, or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
When Hannah Kirby finished “Gimme Shelter” in The Voice’s battle round, her fate was in the hands of her coach, Blake Shelton. If you’ve never seen The Voice, it’s a singing competition show that strives to cut out the looks and glamour of being a musician and get to the…
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run Tuesday night. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect for…
Whenever a group of comedic movie mockers stage a live commentary for a bad movie screening, the movies are secondary. David Schmader, a writer who has performed live movie commentaries in 2002, wants you to see the movies. Wait, scratch that, just this one movie. He’s done over 50 commentaries…
