Animated short by Chris “Stoph” Daniel. A few minutes after 7:30, when the North Texas College Film Festival was scheduled to start, the screen was as blank as it had been at 7:15 or 7:00. Sporadic bits of sound had come through the Dallas Angelika’s speakers, but nothing had registered…
The most recent census data puts the population of Denton at 113,383. It’s the home to two universities, multiple music festivals, a documentary film festival, and a thriving city square. Dallas is just an hour away by I-35, but what of it, Denton seems to day. It can’t compete size-wise,…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…
Every week, 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. American Beauty Screens Wednesday…
“I was hoping to be finished like two weeks ago, but things happen,” Eddie Lee Henderson says, taking a seat across from me. He’s tall, thin and resembles a more youthful Lenny Kravitz. With him is Trevor Ayala, a 2011 Plano East graduate. We’re meeting at a small but bustling…
The Nasher released its Summer/Fall schedule of ’til Midnight events today, and there’s some real gems in there. The late night series is a Dallas staple that pairs live bands, great movies and free admission on the third Friday evening of each month. The next six are a strong collection,…
Every week, 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. Badlands Now available on…
“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…
