The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. The crime-scene photos of three young boys killed in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas, are, of course, harrowing, as is footage of the parents shattered by the loss. But recent American life has made such scenes all too familiar…
A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence for retired musicians. Former conductor Cedric (Michael Gambon), bedecked in a series of fantastic caftans and charged with organizing the annual gala fundraiser, determines that the reunion of the…
In George A. Romero’s deeply silly 1993 Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half, Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a writer whose highbrow pretensions don’t pay the bills. When Thad needs to make a quick buck, then, he seals himself into his study and grinds out a nihilistic thriller to…
Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady…
“It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, the dean of the American action movie, speaking to me from Los Angeles. “Action films are by their very nature more expensive than what are sometimes called, in the independent world, ‘relationship films.’ But I despise these categories. I’ve never…
Rachel MorrisonMichael B. Jordan (The Wire), who’s fully up to the challenge, in Fruitvale.You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in…
Zach Guillot is 8, and he loves Batman. He has a Batman costume (it’s “pretty much real”) and a Batmobile made of cardboard that he drove around his Dallas neighborhood at Halloween, little LEDs lighting the path to chocolate justice. He even has a sidekick: His little brother, who loves…
Each week, Audra Schroeder breaks down the latest episode of HBO’s girls. Episode two of Girls was all about extremes, starting with the lows: Adam’s sad, shirtless YouTube music video, which Hannah and Elijah watch like a nature documentary, while Hannah wonders aloud if Adam loved her enough to…
In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development’s hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet.by Scott Foundas In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute’s ongoing filmmaker development labs as…
There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d’Or. Amour, Haneke’s much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed…
We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the 10 top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero — an attempt at a tonal gene…
For the next 10 days, all Hollywood eyes will turn toward Park City, Utah, at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26). Here’s an early look at some standouts sure to be generating buzz on Main Street: Charlie Victor Romeo If France’s master post-structuralist filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and…
The coffee shop in New York’s Union Square might be packed on this cold afternoon, but scanning the crowded bar it’s hard to miss Alex Karpovsky looming at the far end — even if you’re not familiar with his work. He’s more than six feet tall, so he towers a…
About a decade ago, Shane Carruth released a mind-blowing little film called Primer. It’s a low-budget, low-fi take on time travely-displacementy stuff that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. It was shot around Dallas, and Carruth — who went to high school outside Big D and then…
When pirates began invading ships and taking hostages off the coast of Somalia, it was world news. We heard daily about these ransoms and the rather archaic seeming bandits responsible for the acts. Really, pirates? In this day and age? What we heard little about was why these Somali people…
When we last left Girls, Hannah’s possibly-maybe boyfriend, Adam, had been hit by a truck after uttering the words, “I’m a beautiful fucking mystery to you.” The accident may have been karmic revenge for uttering those words, but it also points to why Girls has become such a cultural tidal…
Dallas has hosted its share of big-name personalities through the years, but Friday was one of the more notable cases in recent memory. Eighties and 90s action movie superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger paid a visit to screen his new movie The Last Stand (January 18), his first star role in a…
It was a crushing ordeal to watch. Just as it seemed that everything was aligning for Jan Brady Lady Edith Crawley, wide-eyed goofball, early-bird dining enthusiast and longtime Bell’s palsy sufferer (unconfirmed) Sir Anthony Strallan abandoned her at the alter. In effort to remove all visible wedding evidence after the…
Whether you’re anxiously awaiting its arrival in your cable box or you’re a decidedly disinterested heterosexual male, Girls season two premieres Sunday night on HBO. Fall into the disinterested category? Allow me to be your guide to making the most out of your lady’s (and, like, everyone else’s) latest obsession,…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he…
Originally slated to open in September 2012, Gangster Squad was delayed when the movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, suddenly made a scene of gunfire in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre “inappropriate.” But released any time, the movie would be a crime against cinematic sensibility. As Gangster Squad opens, boss Mickey Cohen (Sean…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted…
