There are certain big budget releases that will lure any pale, arthouse-lover to the local multiplex. Bond flicks definitely reside in that category. But this November you won’t have to resort to such pedestrian circumstances. Nope. Texas Theatre announced on Twitter that it’s getting a 35mm edition of the film…
Do you ever find yourself missing horror movies that had psychological and intellectual weight to them? Do you weep at the current slasher film scene? Today, horror movies seem like a publically held contest that is judged by: – A quantitative calculation of fake blood by the gallon – Amount…
In his filmmaking debut, journalist David France assembles a thoroughly reported chronicle of ACT UP’s most vital era, from the direct-action group’s founding in 1987 (six years into the AIDS epidemic) through 1995. Expertly compiled from hundreds of hours of archival footage — depicting fractious meetings, infamous demonstrations like 1989’s…
The Revisionaries director Scott Thurman didn’t set out to make a movie about the Texas State Board of Education’s attempts to roll back scientific thought and rewrite the historical narrative of the United States. In the beginning, he was simply planning a short film about a local biology teacher, but…
Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton has mostly been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and becurlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…
The Sundown’s rooftop deck was packed with well-wishers last night. We piled up to congratulate the Granada’s crew on eight great years in Dallas. What nobody predicted before arrival was that a tiny cluster of girls would require much of the available space. Yes, Courtney Loves Dallas was filming during…
We are patio addicts. They’re where we atone for Saturday night’s sins through hungover brunch confessions. We occasionally take our dogs to outdoor happy hours, just so they know the awesome stuff we do without them. And starting this Wednesday we’ll occupy one of the nicest patios in town for…
Early on in Rian Johnson’s time-travel thriller Looper, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self from 30 years in the future (Bruce Willis). When the younger Joe asks the older one about the specifics of temporal displacement, the latter dismisses the question, telling his interlocutor…
Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania’s de-fanged Count Dracula is introduced in an 1895-set prologue while serenading his infant daughter. No menacing carnivore, this Nosferatu has sworn off fatty human blood, is more scared of humans than…
“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky said last week over the phone. “In America especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie…
David France on the History and Survival of ACT UP
“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…
That there’s the recently released trailer for Promised Land, the first mainstream entry into the hopefully thin canon of Fracking Movies, which will of course garner a little more scrutiny on the Barnett Shale. See also: A Moron’s Guide to the Fracking of Dallas The movie, out early next year,…
In the summer of 1955, Marfa Texas wasn’t a burgeoning collage of artists. It was just a little ol’ cowtown where ranchers gave birth to ranchers and everyone stayed put. Even the one point of outside influence, the local airforce base, had long-since boarded up. Life was predictable, aside from…
There’s something startlingly noncommittal about many of the initial reviews of The Master that leaked out following the impromptu screenings writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson organized in 70mm-equipped houses across the country, and later in response to the film’s official bow at the Venice Film Festival. This is perhaps the natural,…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an unseasonably mild August afternoon in the Astoria section of Queens, where later tonight he will preview his latest film for an invited audience at the…
An amiable, seriocomic high-school-reunion movie, 10 Years succeeds in pulling off a fine varsity talent show. Although some performers (notably Channing Tatum, who also produced, and Ari Graynor) are more appealing than others, the film is admirably consistent in its nostalgia-averse exploration of the uncertainties that define one’s late 20s…
Typically, the creators of comic book adaptations assume that ingratiating themselves to anyone unfamiliar with their characters/properties demands boilerplate origin stories where protagonists exhaustively declare who they are in no uncertain terms. This is, thankfully, not true of Dredd, whose creators have the confidence to treat their narrative like just…
There is a scene in last year’s Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is confronted by a long conference table of dreary-looking, uncomprehending, stick-in-the-mud veteran scouts. Trouble With the Curve, Clint Eastwood’s first on-screen role in four years, is those scouts’ revenge, casting the Sabermetrics nerds as nemeses. Eastwood…
In conjunction with our annual Best of Dallas issue, which hits the streets and the interstreets today, we held debates for several awards, including Best Burger. Mostly these were debates between two writers; in this case, I transcribed an ongoing internal struggle. Joe: The Ticket? Really, dude? Joe: It’s great…
You shouldn’t have lost faith in the first place. There is no Kristen Wiig if Tina Fey and Amy Poehler never move on, no Forte without Ferrell’s departure. The show must go on, and it did on Saturday night, with a lot of help from Bill Hader. This was the…
A critic’s report from a film festival like Toronto, where something like 300 features were unveiled from September 6 through 16, can be something like a Rorschach test — or, at least, it can be something like the Rorschach test depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s TIFF entry, The Master, in…
Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week. As the summer of self-plagiarism comes to a close, add Terrence Malick to the list of those accused of this debatable crime: The auteur’s quick follow-up to last year’s The Tree of Life, To The Wonder,…
