Sean Baker’s Starlet stars Dree Hemingway (Ernest’s great-granddaughter) as Jane, a 21-year-old “girl next door” porn performer whose off-hours are spent getting high in the Valley house she shares with fellow “starlet” Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa’s small-time impresario boyfriend (James Ransone). The story in the movie, which screens at…
Pee Wee’s Playhouse was a collage of art forms, where furniture puppets turned into characters and wallpaper sucked you into a cross-dimensional portal. If you cracked open the snow-globe brain of artist Wayne White you’d see much of the same. He designed the set for the cult production back in…
The trailer for Cloud Atlas, the gargantuan new movie of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that took two Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer to adapt, looks less like a preview than a whole slate of coming attractions, so many and varied are the times and places that it touches down. The…
Gossip Girl and The O.C., the two teen TV shows created in the past decade by 36-year-old Josh Schwartz, are sly bait and switches. Both are easily marketable for their hot (mess) fashion-plate stars, wide-eyed luxury fetishism, soapy season arcs and savvy self-reference, but both are also, at heart, deeply…
At around the four-minute mark of my first viewing of the Cloud Atlas trailer, as the M83 track swelled to its bursting point and a hoverbike darted through future-Korea, I remember emailing and GChatting at least a dozen friends with a link to the preview and my take: “Holy Shit.”…
There’s a scene from the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou that everyone who’s taken a film history class will remember: A man (Luis Bunuel, the writer-director) is sharpening a straight razor on his balcony. He then takes the blade and runs it along his thumb. The film shows a…
Sex. Love. Dope. Violence. Rock ‘n’ roll. Gary Oldman. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spugen set the bar for dysfunction in punk rock coupling. Their violence drove their passion. Their daily diet of heroin didn’t help the matter. Still, there’s something charming about that love story. Not fictitious film romance, “Rocky…
Every Texan’s favorite high-school football drama has been an amusing subplot in the presidential campaign ever since Mitt Romney co-opted Friday Night Light’s locker-room slogan: “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.” The show’s creator didn’t approve; the author of the book upon which the show based did. And the Romney…
Cable channel HGTV goes big and goes Home, Strange Home with the new show about odd domiciles and the people who dwell in them. Premiering at 8 p.m., Friday, the weekly series starts with a visit to Carlos Cardoza’s “Mod House,” a mid-century gem in North Dallas decorated retro style,…
This week’s Paranormal Activity 4 continues the story of an extended American family whose members own a lot of surveillance cameras, camcorders, smartphones, baby monitors, webcams, Talkboys and other consumer electronic devices with which they record the haunting of their homes by a terrifying demonic entity. The original Paranormal Activity,…
English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical, impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is unmercifully filtered through the…
“Positive characterizations are complex characterizations,” says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. “That’s all we need to know. They shouldn’t be saccharine. They shouldn’t feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them.” It’s a recent Sunday afternoon, and…
THIS VIDEO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK DUE TO BOOBS Before Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle dragged us into Scottish drug addiction with Trainspotting. It’s a perfect encapsulation of club life flirting with damnation, but more importantly it proves the Ewan McGregor is still a heart throb…
Dallas knows a thing or 12 about being the target of one of Buzz Bissinger’s trademark tirades. So we feel for Peter Berg, creator of the Friday Night Lights TV show and the fictional rallying cry at the center of one of the dumbest campaign feuds this side of Bird…
The odds are good that you watched The Walking Dead’s season two finale — more than 9 million people tuned in and saw Rick and Carl set that zombie barn to flambé. Now with Halloween lurking in your periphery, the show returns for season three this Sunday, October 14, and…
The new Spring Valley location of Studio Movie Grill marks the company’s seventh dinner theater in Texas and tenth in the country. To celebrate the newest edition to Dallas’ dine-and-watch theater family, Spring Valley’s SMG is offering admission for only $1 throughout opening weekend (October 12 to the 14). Still…
Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place head shots, and post-everything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los…
Perhaps more than any other male American star of his generation, Ben Affleck understands the narrative advantage of having Hollywood on your side. The Good Will Hunting co-screenwriter and co-star won an Oscar at age 25 in large part because he and collaborator Matt Damon, as struggling actors who created…
In Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, a prune-faced, simian-mouthed sexagenarian sits by the road in an old suit and brown-patterned tie, and cradles a white bunny in his arms. This is precisely what we’ve come to expect of a Tom Waits entrance. Waits has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite sight…
English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s atypical, impressionistic approach to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is her adaptation’s main hook. As with Fish Tank and Red Road, Arnold’s last two feature-length dramas, the new Wuthering Heights is very much about the act of looking. The novel’s tempestuous plot is thus unmercifully filtered through…
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s remarkable new adaptation of Wuthering Heights comes packing some redoubtable weapons, including the most atmospheric ultra-realism the story has ever seen, an awesome sense of the Yorkshire landscape and no small payload of brooding poeticism. But undoubtedly, its coup de grâce has everything to do with…
Last Wednesday we kicked off a new weekly film series at the Sundown, that amazing rooftop bar next door to the Granada. Not only did a few of you show up, so many came that folks cuddled on each other’s laps to conserve space. It was a great evening in…
