“I’ve got a certain amount of fame, I’ve got money — I wish I could fuckin’ drive,” 86-year-old Elaine Stritch carps just a breath into Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, a gift of a documentary celebrating its subject’s brittle brilliance, still-here indomitability, brash comic truth-telling and principled refusal to wear anything…
Alain Resnais’ last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown onscreen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in the…
(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…
First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-timestream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the Dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
It’s official, AMC announced the premiere date for its new series Halt and Catch Fire,the drama set during the PC boom in Dallas. The show will debut Sunday, June 1 at 9 p.m. CST. The show takes place in the early 1980’s and tells the story of the race to…
Sarah Jessica Parker will be in Dallas on March 9 to promote her shoe line and probably make Nordstrom’s in NorthPark a giant nightmare of starstruck women of all ages. The department store won’t be safe to go near for an entire afternoon. SJP is best known as her New…
Dallas International Film Festival released the first 10 films of its lineup on Monday and we’re liking the way it looks so far. Among the films announced is a flick produced by local Lascaux films called Words and Pictures , the world premiere of a movie starring Nick Offerman, and…
Several weeks back I listened to two long, in-depth interviews with the actor and comedian Will Forte, one with Chris Hardwick and one with Marc Maron. Forte was charming and silly and is apparently unlucky in love, a family man worried he’ll never have a family, and he’s profoundly weird…
WES from Alejandro Prullansky on Vimeo. If you’re into movies with smart characters who secretly feel shunned by society and scenes with supremely low frame rates, you’re in luck. The Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson is having a mini-film fest of director Wes Anderson’s films all next week. The Drafthouse’s “Week…
Morning news shows have to fill a lot of time for audiences who are barely awake or so hungover that they don’t realize the TV is actually on, so they have a little more leeway with their content. That’s why you’ve never seen folks like Brian Williams doing cooking segments…
Action heroes with nothing to lose are the best kind, perhaps the only kind worth watching. In the opening seconds of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop, Liam Neeson’s federal air marshal Bill Marks slumps in his parked vehicle, sloshing a few glugs of whiskey into a paper cup and stirring it up…
In 1998, Douglas Adams published a sweet, funny essay called “Riding the Rays,” about an excursion to Hayman Island to try a kind of underwater jet ski device called a Sub Bug because it afforded an opportunity to swim with manta rays. He wrote of his encounter with the creature:…
First, let’s get this out of the way: There is no Santa Claus. Now, on to a perhaps even harsher truth: There are certain indications that Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose 17th-century paintings — like Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Music Lesson — show an extraordinarily delicate touch…
The corpse lay crumpled on the conference table, close enough that the studio executive could tug on the red heel of her Louboutins. She’d been lying there unnoticed, or perhaps just ignored, for quite some time. Her wedding veil was tattered and someone had spilled coffee on her white satin…
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn’t … or at least not nearly as well,” says film preservationist Joe Rubin. Rubin, 24 years old, is one of the creators working Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-Ray–centric home video…
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…
The Oscars are coming! Yay! I haven’t seen any of the movies, on account of the stupid infant and his inability to take care of himself for three hours, so I have no idea which new movies are the best new movies. I also have no idea what the outside…
Jay Leno must be lonely. What has Jay Leno been doing the last couple weeks?
In film after film from the late ’70s into the mid-’80s, the slobs — often led by writer-director-actor Harold Ramis, who died today at age 69 — trounced the snobs in each of their face-offs: at Faber College, at Camp North Star, at Sergeant Hulka’s Fort Arnold, against that ginger…
“Over the weekend, I won my first air sex competition,” says Steven Walters, gleefully lighting a cigarette. “I even beat out a sexy pole dancer.” It’s a sunny Monday afternoon in February and I’m sitting next to Walters on a bench outside of Crooked Tree Coffeehouse in Uptown. The busy…
Almost a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, In Secret boasts vigor and…
