“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made…
An actress in her 30s — a woman, that is, still playing characters of babymaking age — may have it even tougher than actresses in their 40s and 50s. Unless she is exceedingly glamorous, a la Charlize Theron, she can all too easily get stranded in the land of mom…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead-ends, blind links and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…
File this under way-too-cute: The Dallas International Film Festival just announced a day-long family event at Klyde Warren Park, anchored by a 20-year-anniversary screening of The Sandlot. The free event is Saturday, April 6, and will also feature college dudes singing a capella, storytelling and opera. But mostly it will…
April Fools’ Day is creeping up to us. To celebrate, Gavin Industries and Mixmaster, the future-award-nominated culture blog of the Dallas Observer, have teamed up to bring you Spaceballs on the roof of the Sundown at Granada. Seriously, we swear: Please join us Monday, April 1 at 9 p.m., so…
I posed this question to a friend last night: Has there been a main character in recent TV series history who has been so irredeemable, so flawed? We came up with Larry David, to whom Dunham’s character has been compared, both for their complete lack of awareness and how heavily…
Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism and psychosis all tied together by one teenage girl’s homicidal coming of age. Psychosexual imagery permeates every inch of renowned South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s stateside debut. A blood-tipped pencil, or water dripping…
Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter, or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…
In 1988 the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973…
Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers—a mouth that suggests her characters might…
For a movie as much in love with New York’s outer-borough street life as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, it will not do just to talk about the film. That’s what Leon insists, and so I find myself heading north with Leon on FDR Drive on an overcast Friday afternoon,…
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So goes the adage from John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and so it has gone for Heaven’s Gate, the class-war Western written and directed by one of Ford’s truest disciples among contemporary…
To most of the world, spring break seems like a lot of fun, but people who live in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, or South Padre Island understand the dark side. Damn college kids pass through for a week to drink liquor, trash the streets, and wear T-shirts announcing, “I survived spring…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming week or weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. Ministry of Fear Now…
A bitterly Good Night. The full list is posted, and it includes an earlier teased category of Italian films. In that showcase you’ll get a dusting off of two classics, Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful and Fellini’s 8 1/2, along with three newbies. Probably the buzziest film In the Texas…
Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…
It’s a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar. That, of course, is also the name of the awards ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging…
We can speak of climate change with a fair amount of certitude: shrinking Arctic ice cover, rising global temperatures and increased frequency of extreme weather events. Most of us acknowledge that things are getting worse faster than previously predicted, and that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have likely played a major…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming week or weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. Now, Forager Screens tonight…
I’m still waiting on that POGS film… Knowing that Pulitzer Prize winning author and cartoonist Art Spiegelman created the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series, makes their existence so much sweeter. Still, I can’t help but imagine his reaction went he went to see The Garbage Pail Kids Movie world…
As episode eight opens, we follow Hannah down the street. She receives a text from Adam, which causes her to have a nervous tic, one we’ve never seen before. We’re reminded Hannah got an e-book deal, and the deadline is looming, with nary a word written. Hannah starts doing everything…
