Stolen Seas

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…

Your Breaking Bad Drinking Game

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…

I Drank Two Sex Panthers at Alamo Drafthouse’s Ribbon-Cutting Last Night

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…

Can’t Stop the Serenity: Geek Out for a Cause

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…

Elysium Sinks in a Swamp of Allegory

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…

We’re the Millers : They’e the Hater

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…

Deep in the Heart of Texans

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…

Alamo Drafthouse Is Going to Change the Way Dallas Does Movies

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…

In 2 Guns, 2 Much, 2 Little

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…

The Death Squad Plays Itself

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…

In Crystal Fairy, a Great Dickish Performance by Michael Cera

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,…

Mainstream Movie Porn Sucks: How Real Sex in Real Movies Is a Real Distraction

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…

The Canyons Is Vital, Messy, and Alive With Regret

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…