One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
Is it possible to be accidentally definitive? James D. Cooper’s thorough and revealing doc Lambert & Stamp is billed as the story of the managers who whipped the Who into being the Who. But once it’s sketched out the characters and ambitions of Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, putative New…
The makers of Black Souls, a superior Italian gangster movie, deserve praise for executing with atypical sensitivity a generic times-are-changing/nostalgia-for-an-imaginary-chivalrous-yesteryear scenario. Like most post-Godfather mafia dramas, Black Souls concerns an ambivalent protagonist — in this case, gruff goat-herder Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane) — who has a love/hate relationship with his family’s…
The world is a magical place, especially if you’re spending time in the parlor of Confetti Eddie. He’s one of the magicians that walks among us, point his wand and making sexy magic. Every month he invites audiences into his studio in Expo Park (it’s the one with the dinosaur…
Texas Frightmare Weekend is a magical event where one can see creepy costumes, scary stars and bathe in red corn syrup until their heart’s content. Thanks to Dallas native, David Park and his friends from Dr. God – the “improv group/production company/medical deity,” audiences will also get the chance to…
Depending on whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
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…
