Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI’ed-to-death climax and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there’s greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman, moments…
From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the last 20 years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to have made…
Judy Blume’s first novel, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, was published in 1969, yet it’s only now, 44 years later, that the first big-screen adaptation of her work—Tiger Eyes, based on 1981’s novel of the same name—finally opens in theaters. This is a disgrace. One can…
Last week, EW columnist Mark Harris tweeted a statistic disturbing to anyone who cares about gender equality on the big screen: “It’s now been 61 days since the last wide release of a major studio movie starring a woman.” Unfortunately, that number will only increase—to 84 days—until Sandra Bullock and…
Sometimes, there’s just too damn much to say about a movie than can fit into any one review. (Even Stephanie Zacharek’s exhaustive, excellent one.) So, here’s more: Stephanie Zacharek, our lead film critic, and Film Editor Alan Scherstuhl hashing over all the portentous craziness in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel…
Superman is an idea. OK, fine. Technically he’s an intellectual property — a set of data points slammed together by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the 1930s, sold for $130 to National Allied Publications (later DC Comics/TimeWarner), and subsequently transformed into a nugget of multivariously exploitable content that has…
As early as Thursday night, comic book fans and blockbuster aficionados will finally have the chance to see Man of Steel, the Zack Snyder-Christopher Nolan take on Superman, the all-American superhero. If you’ve been paying attention to the trailers surfacing periodically on Facebook, Twitter, and in theaters (people still go…
Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly — Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some movies have special meaning for people even if they don’t turn up on lists of established favorites. They’re the secret movies we keep in our pockets like…
Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn’t stop Vladimir Putin’s government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the…
Fans of punk, DIY, transgressive and avant-garde cinema, brace yourself: Tonight, ancient seals will be blown open as the millimeter offerings of Texas Theatre drop from a trustworthy 35 to 16 and even — wait for it… Super 8. A gambling pool has started regarding what, exactly, will happen when…
The Texas Theatre has become a cultural anchor amid the shifting tides of Oak Cliff, and the Oak Cliff Film Festival is fast becoming an important part of the beer-pouring, 35MM-spooling theater’s diverse arsenal. This year’s sophomore version, which opens Thursday, will only further secure that anchor. Dallas’ small film…
Los Angeles artist Andre Perkowski is a cinematic meddler. He rifles through public domain film footage picking out the bits he likes, then he weaves them together into montages and full-length works. One of the most interestingly Frankensteined of them all arrives in Dallas Saturday night for the Oak Cliff…
May Now You See Me, 5/31: Action filmmaker Louis Leterrier’s output is all over the map, from the fitfully delightful Transporter 2 to that irredeemable Clash of the Titans remake. His latest sounds pretty dopey — the FBI tries to stop a group of bank-robbing magicians — but Leterrier, the…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
There’s a thing that sometimes happens to copy editors, the workhorses who do the final grammar cleanup, general fine-tuning and, sometimes, miracle-working before a story goes to print: An editor higher on the food chain will receive a disheveled manuscript from a writer, make a few halfhearted tweaks and pass…
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie — like the posters and commercials — won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the…
Before Van Wilder flashed his glamor grin and Accepted achieved its cult accreditation; before Frank the Tank went streaking in the quad, Pivon threw meat on protesters and a house of nerds out-competed the Alpha Betas with an electric violin, there was the original: Animal House. This 35-year-old salute to…
The greatest film ever made about a time-traveling DeLorean soundtracked by Huey Lewis will screen for free in the Arts District’s Strauss Square on Sunday, June 2. It’s the next installment of the popular (and BYOB) Sunset Screening film series. Reserve tables and lawn seats to watch it here. The…
The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy’s comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” without anyone ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and…
There are times during the affecting tumult of What Maisie Knew when you may think, “At last, a first-rate American movie about what being a kid actually feels like!” And then there are times when, despite the scrupulousness of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s adherence to the perspective of…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Not only are we, like we’re sure you are, genuinely excited about the return of Arrested Development on May 26, we also have absolutely no idea what will happen. The family, those blowhards, could be scattered around the globe, and indeed initial reports suggested that there wouldn’t be a massive…
