Arsenio HallIt’s been 19 years since Arsenio Hall last barked at the camera, and the world has changed. Shoulder pads are passé; (“Unless you play football, you can’t have them anymore,” Hall jokes), hip-hop is mainstream and, after our so-called first black president, the country elected a real one –…
Bernie Su and Hank Green captured the hearts, iPhones, Pinterest pages, Instagram accounts and GetGlue music playlists of teens across America with their 2012 series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which updated Pride and Prejudice to modern life through real-time transmedia storytelling. The series consisted of 9½ hours of content stretched…
“If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen, of course, could be…
It’s tempting, after watching the exceptional new film Museum Hours, to describe director Jem Cohen’s visual style as chiefly “observational.” The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their…
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-’bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well-known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7-foot-3 actor who played Chewbacca in the…
Summer 2013 was a strong season for that oft-maligned genre, the romantic comedy. Excellent films like The Spectacular Now and Drinking Buddies for the most part avoided rom-com cliches, and reinventions like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing made timeless story lines seem fresh. Still other on-screen romances were held…
Go local. We hear it, we do it (sometimes) and we chastise others when they don’t. Local food. Local beer. Local music. Well, now’s your chance to check out D-FW’s local film talent. On Thursday, the USA Film Festival once again partners with the Texas Association of Film and Tape…
The movie that made college look like it was worth racking up a mountain of debt that even a Republican fundraiser couldn’t pay off is getting the special screening it deserves tonight … again. (More on that in a bit.) The Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson will screen National Lampoon’s Animal…
Richard B. Riddick — Dick to his friends, if he had any — is an intergalactic meathead who has glowered through three movies, two video games and a cartoon. He’s both the luckiest and unluckiest man alive: lucky because he’s impossible to kill, unlucky because everyone keeps trying. In the…
Short Term 12 is the kind of film that sounds agonizingly depressing on paper but mesmerizes onscreen. It’s a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition and resonance. Easily one of the best films so far this year, it’s a nearly perfect…
As at most festivals, screenings at Venice are preceded by a recorded message asking everyone to turn off their cell phones. A very cultured-sounding lady delivers this request first in Italian and then in English. She caps off the English version with the words, “Thank you for your collaboration.” My…
Plenty of film critics and Asian cinema aficionados care deeply that The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai’s pointillist biopic of martial arts master Ip Man and the director’s first picture in six years, will be released in the States only in a 108-minute version. The cut released in China earlier this year…
Since it’s called Austenland, and since it’s a romantic comedy, you probably expect it to open with “It’s a truth universally acknowledged” and to wrap with one lovesick sap madly dashing after another, right up to an airport’s departure gates, even though both presumably have cell phones and could just…
Intricate, intelligent thrillers made specifically for grown-ups are so rare these days that it’s tempting to award extra points to anyone who even scales an attempt. Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 John le Carré adaptation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, may have been the last great example of an adult thriller that refused…
Director Shola Lynch has been mining the rich terrain of black American history for a while now, notably in the award-winning 2004 documentary Chisholm ‘72: Unbought & Unbossed, about the 1972 presidential campaign by the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American and the first woman to mount a serious,…
An average episode of the 1989-1999 cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and his robot buddies heckle bad movies, runs about 90 minutes. The 1955 film This Island Earth is 87 minutes. The 1996 feature Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, in which the man and…
As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Last evening I was welcomed to Venice, where I’m just settling in for the 2013 edition of the city’s film festival, with a spectacular lightning storm over the Grand Canal. This…
This is the first trailer released for Dallas Buyers Club, the new drama based on the life of Ron Woodroof, who smuggled and sold unlicensed medications when he was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-’80s. Naturally, it’s set in Dallas and stars our favorite paper doll, Matthew McConaughey, who lost…
David Lowery’s newest, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, opens in wide-release today, and naturally he’d like you to see it. As luck would have it, three of his filmmaking buddies also have big releases dropping. Since promoting just his own would be very Un-Lowery of him, he’s designed a challenge, complete…
The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…
