Every year Hollywood cranks them out — saccharine remakes of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, with minor plot tweaks and overused actors. They’ve ruined the dial, filling it with cinema’s version of re-gifting. Meanwhile, original movies that were great the first few hundred times play on a…
Tweens, shut-ins, cat ladies and frustrated housewives too timid for 50 Shade of Grey entered their final throes of Twilight-related delirium last week. Apparently, not all vampires live forever. As fans search for another fantasy franchise to fill the emotional void, the rest of us see simply the end of…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of–Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s pre-release…
America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven’t faced since the Battle of New Orleans is a proper ground invasion, a shooting war with a foreign occupying army. Rather than accept this as good fortune, the absence of this…
Joe Wright’s dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man Nabokov called “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction,” but the whole checkered history of Leo Tolstoy at the movies. A visit to Tolstoy’s imdb.com page gives the…
Last weekend the Wheel Mobile rolled through the Metroplex and I had a front row seat. Well, technically I was located somewhere in the middle, but potato, pa-tah-to, let’s get to it. What the eff is a Wheel Mobile? Fair question: It’s Wheel of Fortune on wheels. The show is…
Well all, it’s been a great run. These weekly collaborations with the Dallas Film Society and Sundown at Granada have turned Wednesday evenings into amazingly fun, community events. Plus, there’s booze. (Who ever thought it could be so good?) Tonight, step away from the turkey. Wipe the stuffing off your…
If this isn’t a pitch perfect send-up of every holiday you’ve ever spent back home, you must live somewhere exotic. Or your parents are dead. One of the two…
The Oak Cliff Film Fest leaked a little news this morning about its plans for a second installment in 2013, and it worked. We’re excited. Just a few months back, the group proved that there was, in fact, room for another cinematic celebration here in Dallas. And it did it…
What you see above is Aaron Sorkin, writer of all of the things people like, talking about his plans for the forthcoming Steve Jobs biopic, based on the biography by Walter Isaacson. It includes this rather detailed reveal, which was transcribed by Grantland:…
Picking up where the original film left off, Leatherface returns to sling his gas-powered weapon in 3D this January. The crew just released a new, extra Texas-y clip from the upcoming release, and it’s piled high with curse words and night terror potential. Man, too bad barns are made of…
The building’s construction continues for a few more months, but our new Alamo Drafthouse can’t wait that long to meet you. It wants to party NOW. What’s an unfinished theater to do? For the Alamo Richardson, the answer is simple: Take that bash outdoors. Tonight, November 16, our much anticipated…
It’s getting easier and easier to find movie screenings with live musical accompaniment these days. It’s harder to find it done well. On Tuesday night, the Dallas Chamber Symphony proved they know exactly how to create a well executed, interactive and entertaining live music/film screening experience. Artistic director and conductor…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
Unclassifiable, expansive and breathtaking, Holy Motors, the first feature-length film from Leos Carax since Pola X (1999) — and only his fifth in 28 years — received a log line of sorts from its writer-director at the press conference following the movie’s world premiere at Cannes. “This is a film…
Wheel Of Fortune has been bringing families together, often to shout frustrated expletives at contestants, since 1975. It combines life’s greatest things: a spinny prize wheel, an illuminated version of Hangman and the eternal fountain of grace and youth that is Vanna White. This weekend Dallas Fort Worth watchers will…
You’ve got to wonder if the Cohen brothers were able to predict the pop-culture trajectory of The Big Lebowski. It’s spawned a nationally touring tribute festival, created a new generation of white Russian drunkards and even made the word “nihilist” trendy. Plus, it’s got everyone: John Goodman at his absolute…
No one would ever call John Hawkes a movie star, and he likes that just fine. Unfortunately for him, the buzz about him is growing by the day. The ever-private actor is finding himself in the spotlight more and more. The Oscar-betting machine is putting its money of Hawkes for…
Our wide-ranging interview with Billy Bob Thornton.
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in 50 years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
