Depending on your perspective, Zooey Deschanel is either the cutest, funniest, most adorable little retro-kookster on earth, or she’s an irritating try-hard with zero comedy chops. The only thing the world seems able to universally agree on is that Deschanel has nice bangs. As such, her sitcom — New Girl,…
When River Phoenix died in October, 1993, he was three weeks away from completing his performance in Dark Blood, an $8 million indie film that had already done five weeks of shooting on location in southern Utah. In this lurid modern film noir, Phoenix was cast as “Boy,” a mysterious,…
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. When I Rise Screens…
I’ve been frustrated by the latest season of Downton Abbey. It began with the edited out wedding in episode one, was enhanced by too many Edith romance story lines and then the loss of Lady Sybil? Unforgivable. So when the season finale rolled around, I didn’t watch it. Instead, I…
After last week’s singular episode, we’re plopped back into reality this week on Girls. Hannah discovers she’s gotten an E-book deal, but only has one month to write it, and subsequently vomits in front of a gaggle of brunchers. Marnie is still dating Booth Jonathan, unbeknownst to him, and the…
This weekend, the locally made film The Playroom begins a limited run at Oak Cliff’s historic Texas Theatre. Two familiar faces, John Hawkes and Molly Parker, have central roles in the movie as Martin and Donna Cantwell, a couple who share a drunken evening with a pair of friends while…
Your Valentine’s dinner is over you want a nice movie to share with your special someone. You’ve got a bottle of wine to open, a box chocolates to share. You want to relax, but you don’t want to shut your mind off completely. You want something sophisticated, off the beaten…
Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking if you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live Free…
As he’s questioned by a therapist in the opening scene of the film bearing his name, we see Charles Swan III’s subconscious literally spurt out of his head. It’s visualized as an animated collage largely made up of ladies’ long, disembodied legs. It also indicates writer-director Roman Coppola’s approach with…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Before anything else, here’s how dumb things get in A Good Day for Die Hard–Related Media Product, which is being sold as a bang-bang movie sequel so that nobody catches onto its true nature: a black-ops experiment testing the human faculty for discovering coherent patterns in unrelated shards of image…
Child characters endowed with adult intelligence tend to be disappointing puppets through which authors articulate their own views. But allowing a brilliant fictional child her own voice and agency (not to mention age-appropriate behavior) represents this whole other imaginative leap — riskier, but way more interesting and rewarding if actually…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming 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. The Master Screens Friday, Saturday, and…
I wanted to hate last night’s episode of Girls, which begins with Hannah and Ray discussing the origins of the word “sexit,” defined by Hannah as two people leaving a party to have sex. After following Joshua (Patrick Wilson) — a customer who complained about the coffee shop Ray and…
This weekend, February 9-10, fans of all things sci-fi will descend upon the Irving Convention Center for this year’s Sci-Fi Expo. Major guests will be in attendance, including comic book artists and actors from popular sci-fi films and TV shows. The roster includes stars from Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead,…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller revolving around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
To watch Melissa McCarthy as lovable chef Sookie St. James on seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls was to see an actress perfect the art of playing a sidekick. As best friend of the show’s protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), McCarthy dutifully provided comic relief and a shoulder on which…
“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always worked with writers whose voices are so specific that there really isn’t any way to recalibrate things without them being intimately involved,” says Steven Soderbergh as he swivels in a chair in the happily cluttered Flatiron District loft space that doubles as his…
Now in its 6th year, the Thin Line Film Fest brings 11 days of documentary goodness to the streets of Denton. If you were burned in your youth with preachy docs that couldn’t hold your attention, it’s time to re-explore the medium. Thin Line guides you through the best of…
Netflix added a new television series called House of Cards to its streaming library last Friday. Starring Kevin Spacey and developed by Hollywood heavyweight David Fincher (Fight Club, Social Network), the series is a political thriller based on a 1990 BBC series of the same name. But what makes this…
