A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…
Local celebrities are fun. And bartending competitions are super fun because it involves alcohol and tossing of cups and yelling “Get me a double vodka soda” over a loud karaoke rendition of “Uptown Funk You Up.” But the official Celebrity Bartender Throwdown at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Snuffer’s in Addison…
By now, the “cirque” experience is synonymous with high dollar, high rolling entertainment—but by no means does that have to be the case. Sure, the Cirque du Soleil empire gets all the name recognition and has a lock on zillion dollar sets and complex hydraulics, but the unaffiliated Cirque Dreams…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen cancer weepie ever made, if there even is a best teen cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
A few days ago, we got to see Jurassic World. It’s not awful and it’s not great, either — it’s just appetizing enough to enjoy. However, there are a lot of plot holes, continuity, character decisions, and moments in the movie that just don’t make any sense. Here are some…
Gregg Turkington is one of the greatest comedians of our time and you probably haven’t heard of him. If us girls are being honest here, it’s likely he’ll stay pretty far off your radar. He’s best known for is character Neil Hamburger, a strange alter ego of Turkington that the…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs started walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disneyland. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas: Isla Nublar, home of the…
Rub the sleep out of your eyes, Dallas. Fuel up with a double shot of espresso, a few rips off your roommate’s bong, or whatever it will take you key you up for an especially long weekend of cinematic jouissance. Oak Cliff Film Festival is back for its fourth year…
If any ounce of you, maybe your optimistic, glass-half-full side of you, thought The Bachelor had any string of realness, a new Lifetime scripted series confidently puts that to rest. In the 30 combined seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, there has yet to be a TV show, movie,…
There will be days this summer when you want to blow your brains out. The kids are going to whine about being bored every few minutes; the temperature will hover in the low 300-degree range, and the biggest movie of the summer will most likely be Mission Impossible 32 with…
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy. “In L.A., people would say, ‘Oh, I was…
If you enjoy ironic consumption, Granada Theater and Dallas Comedy House have joined forces for the Summer Mockbuster Series. Starting with Batman and Robin on Saturday June 6, this exercise in bad taste gives you the chance to sit with others, imbibe, and talk shit about awful movies. Or rather,…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what…
“I hate myself.” That’s an unusual statement coming from the hero of an animated film, let alone in the first two minutes. But 12-year-old orphan Anna (Sara Takatsuki), the protagonist of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s lovely anime When Marnie Was There, has no illusions about her place in the world: There’s an…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt. But in the years since, Hollywood continued to see…
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier),…
In this industry, I meet a lot of people who talk a lot of shit. “This industry” meaning the film industry. Most heard: “Love your idea, let’s get together and talk about it,” “Send me your script and I’ll pass it to the right people,” “I’d love to be a…
