Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
You don’t need this writer to tell you that the most hotly anticipated televisual extravaganza of the year is upon us this weekend, as all-time great TV series Breaking Bad returns for the start of its final eight-episode hurrah. It’s been a show based entirely around one question — What…
NOTE: To any PR or media relations people out there: all future press events should include bottomless Champagne. Thank you. Alamo Drafthouse’s new Richardson location had its official ribbon-cutting/giant robot-unveiling last night. Founder Tim League and Chief Operating Officer Bill DiGaetano were joined by various local figures including Richardson Mayor…
Fox’s gut-wrenching cancellation of the cult series Firefly didn’t stop Joss Whedon and the Serenity from giving it’s characters the closure they deserved through the film of the same name. A decade after the show’s cancellation, fans across the world continue to prove year after year that you Can’t Stop…
MTV is launching a new “reality docu-series” called Big Tips Texas. It’s not a porn-based reality series about Texan penis sizes, FYI. We asked. Turns out, it’s about “an eclectic group of women” who work at a bar. In Texas. Allegedly, “Whether they’re partying on Lake Lewisville, planning their futures,…
The Guardian called Post Tenebras Lux “an opaque, unforthcoming, exasperating work.” Salon author Andrew O’Hehir countered, saying Carlos Reygadas’ newest is “a mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller.” (He then went on to slam Terrence Malick.) These reviews are indicative of the erotic, heady…
Endearing is a weird word to use for horror movies, but it’s an accurate one for independent and low budget horror movies that aren’t lazy creature features or slasher flicks. Enter Jug Face, which opens at Magnolia Theater this Friday. Ada lives in a backwoods community in an unnamed part…
Movie stars shouldn’t be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday’s youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That’s not to say actors can’t age gracefully, or that…
If there’s one nuance mainstream comedies have yet to learn, it’s that “empathetic” need not mean “likable” — audiences can feel for characters they don’t necessarily want to be. The hit black comedy Horrible Bosses, which had three angry underlings plotting murderous vengeance against their you-know-whats, should have been a…
When David Gordon Green introduced Paul Rudd to Emile Hirsch, the two actors didn’t click. It was an awkward seafood dinner. “Emile just started talking about something — girls, maybe — and I was doing a piss-poor job of trying to follow along,” recalls Rudd. “And when Emile got up…
For anyone who’s been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the ’70s and ’80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him. Whenever Allen comes out with…
In David Lowery’s sublime new film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), who’s serving 25 to life for armed robbery and wounding a cop during a shootout, frequently puts pencil to parchment paper and writes love letters to his girlfriend, Ruth (Rooney Mara). Bob’s aching, lovelorn voice can…
In June 2011, Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse theater chain boldly transformed a customer complaint into a provocative piece of advertising. The ad in question became one of the no talking-no texting PSAs the chain runs before movies, and it features a profanity-laden rant from a female customer who was asked to…
Last month we gave you “Your July Guide to Dallas’ Free Outdoor Movies. You’re Welcome, Cheapskate.” Well, July’s come and gone, and it’s effing hot. It’s time to move the free movie screenings indoors. With beer. But not free beer…
We’ve all collectively scanned a block of text and clicked on the “agree” button before thoroughly reading through the terms and conditions for iTunes, Google, Facebook, and other massive corporations to whom we willingly give our personal info. What’s in the fine print and what happens after we click is…
With Alamo Drafthouse’s first DFW location opening this week, we talked to their creative manager, James Wallace. Those in the Dallas film community will know Wallace from Gordon & the Whale, a movie website that trafficked in reviews and advance screening, and following that, I Heart Cinema. He has also…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema’s capacity for inquiry, confrontation and remembrance…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy,…
The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grown-ups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star–two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex into their…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways—and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh and in others…
