Film, TV & Streaming

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…

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…

“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,…