The first film from émigré director Pawel Pawlikowski since 2004’s dreamy My Summer of Love, this thoroughly odd and brooding psycho-puzzle trains in on Ethan Hawke’s displaced American writer-academic, arrived in Paris to see his ex-wife and young daughter despite a restraining order, a recent hospital stay and a history…
For all its flash and bling, Dallas is a pretty easy city to do on the cheap. Take this weekend: With the Oak Cliff Film Fest in town, cinematic scavengers can feast on five freebie scraps at both outdoor and indoor viewings. Over at Strauss Square, you’re invited to RSVP…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell hot. But in an unusual twist for a twentysomething performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress — she hasn’t…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated as a stage production, first…
Don’t panic. The two-hour premiere of the relaunched Dallas hasn’t started yet. Right now on TNT … let’s see … we’ve got an old episode of Law & Order that we’ve probably all slept through five times. … Yep, I’ve dreamed about Jesse L. Martin telling someone to “sit yo…
The clothes. The backstabbing. The most insidious family tree ever planted in an oil field. It’s “Dallas,” and it’s back. Wednesday night we’ll see if the three-decade morality struggle between J.R. and Bobby grows richer when legacy gifted to their heirs as our favorite Texas-centric melodrama picks back up in…
Welcome back, Ewings. Where y’all been? Only in television limbo, it turns out, because everything that ever was on TV eventually is reborn. (Out of desperation, apparently. What else explains the soon-to-return Munsters?) Dallas is back as a “new” series tonight at 8 p.m., with a two-hour premiere on cable’s…
This week, the first-ever Oak Cliff Film Festival kicks off in and around the Bishop Arts District. According to Texas Theatre/OCFF co-founder Barak Epstein, the fest is intended to be “a new hyper-local film festival that would all take place in one bikeable area.” So bikeable, in fact, that Saturday…
This amazing spoof of modern dating programs was created by Ben Stiller and set loose on the internets last week. While it most directly mocks “The Bachelor” (which is casting in Dallas this Wednesday), it isn’t much crazier than the rest of the crap we’re watching. Have you ever seen…
1. Mad Men I can’t get the image out of my mind. You know what I’m talking about. A certain partner, hanging lifeless on a certain door of a certain office. … Oh, you know what? Screw you if you’re sensitive to spoilers. Get caught up like the rest of…
Do you ever ask yourself what major motion pictures have been produced in your own backyard? Well, so did we and it was pretty surprising what we dug our of this concrete pretzel called Dallas/Fort Worth. Here’s a list of 10 prominent D/FW filmed flicks (in alphabetic order)! A few…
It’s a warm spring evening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, and the crowd jostling for hors d’oeuvres in the lobby of the Paramount Theater exudes the anticipatory hum of a gala studio premiere. Only tonight’s feature presentation isn’t a new summer blockbuster or year-end prestige release. Rather, it’s…
Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer movie, a blockbuster-with-brains that links the genesis and the ultimate fate of mankind beyond the stars. It is, incidentally, the story of an ambitious mission gone wrong…
Three generations of fine actresses are squandered in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results. This head-hammering, clash-of-values family-healing dramedy makes sure to literalize all of its uplifting messages; gentle admonitions about “letting go” are immediately followed…
Any event that combines tapas and Spanish cinema shoots to the top of our priorities list, so when we got word that a new monthly film series called Pata Negra was launching at Texas Theatre and doling out tapas, we showed up unattractively hungry, with napkin in hand. For a…
1.’Game of Thrones’ I’d say “Blackwater” was the best episode of G.O.T. to date, unless you can’t get over last season’s dragon-reveal finale. And, really, get over it. The dragons obvi won’t be ready for crazy, fire-breathing attacks any time soon. So we have to be happy with a cinematic…
Now that television has, for the most part, settled into blessed respite for the next three months, the onset of summer designates an ideal moment to step away from that noise and to recharge one’s sluggish mind with some cerebral health food. Making that ambition all the more attainable, The…
If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted to the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow…
It’s 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle, and leaving behind…
In a movie season worshipped for its CGI-boosted, spiritually bankrupt juvenilia, it’s heartening to know that filmmakers still create — and maybe more significantly, that studios still distribute — summer entertainment for grown-ups. Not that those buckets of popcorn are going to empty themselves, but who needs to be reminded…
Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their original release and have as little memory of the experience as if I’d been mind-wiped with one of those “neuralyzing”…
The early ’90s brought us so many important milestones: fly girls droppin’ mad booty shake beats, the tragic ending to the VHS vs. Beta battle, and a washed-up Erik Estrada, post CHiPs. If only we could remember where we buried all of those time capsules… Oh, hell. What if I…
