The devil must have been really busy in the early ’90s; there were a lot of trends and careers who’s successes could only be attributed to fiery soul relinquishment. Angel Martin in Shock ‘Em Dead, tonight’s Tuesday Night Trash movie at Texas Theatre, is no exception. Played by Stephen Quadros…
There’s an over-arching theme in the show Battlestar Galatica that is an apt metaphor for Hollywood: “It happened before and it will happen again.” The “it” in Battlestar is the whole Machines-Become-Sentient-and-Kill-Humans-thing. But the catchy, ominous phrase could be viewed as a metaphor for Hollywood’s persistent ability to repeat mind-numbingly…
You a big fan of the cinematic sweet spot that existed between 1985 and 1995? Like, say, B-grade, man-in-fishmonster-suit horror? How ’bout tiny buzz-saw robot slashers? Pesticide-tripping exterminators uncovering secret insect intrigue? Yeah? Well, your Jesus was at Texas Theatre Saturday — looking rangy and awesome, wearing smoky, round, actor-emeritus…
If you’re still hanging on to that DIFF laminate after a week of intensive film screenings, we are so proud of you. Also, maybe take a shower and call a family member, because you probably smell like buttery popcorn substitute and those closest to you are concerned about your absence…
Earlier this week I said Brooklyn Castle was probably the best film of the festival — well, I may have to amend that statement. While still topping the documentary charts, another horse has pulled ahead in the over-all category: the Korean blockbuster My Way. Selected as one of the festival’s…
Hoodie? Check. Popcorn? Check. Complete list of films to see today at DIFF, seasoned with links to background information and brief descriptions of content? Double check! We’ve got our DIFF picks for Thursday, so prepare your cinematic socks to be rocked…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from the visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to…
Back with his first film in 14 years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. It’s true both in respect to the singularity of his deadpan dialogic style, as well as to his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s follow-up to 1998’s The Last Days of…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican star, who died…
So, we’re halfway through DIFF. Surely by this point you have your favorite seat in each theater (no, I won’t tell you mine, otherwise there will be a popcorn fight) and you’ve made friends with your fellow fest-goers. If not, you still have five more days and dozens of movies…
It probably sounds completely obvious that for the past two days the repeating theme seemed to be creativity. Because, well, naturally, films are creative endeavors. But the documentaries and features (three of four, anyway) centered around creative people — big-time ones, indie ones and “What the hell do I do…
Let the rest of the world bitch about Hump Day, you’re taking a bit of You Time and cozying up with the best independent cinema this side of the Mason/Dixon. Whether you’ve joined the Occupy DIFF movement or just plan to grab a casual post-work seat, we think you’ll like…
Much as you’d like to catch all 160 titles at this year’s DIFF, scheduling (and life) make it impossible, so you have to learn to pick, choose and hope you get awesome results. Leaning from Sunday’s mistakes (yeah, I’m looking at you, Bringing Up Bobby), I went with two Faust…
If you’ve been camping out in theaters for the last five days with your G Chat set to “unavailable”, we salute you. Living la vida DIFF isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach for that matter. I’m curious: what’s the largetst thing you’ve smuggled into a theater by now?…
The best part of having experienced your Big Film Fail in the first weekend of DIFF is knowing that you’ve gotten major disappointment out of the way and you can now just sit back, relax, and finish out on a high note. Maybe the note won’t be quite as high…
We love film here at the Observer, so this year we dispatched our finest stringers to chronicle what they’ve seen and guide you through the Dallas International Film Festival. Touch base for daily reviews by Merritt Martin, Jennifer Medina and James Wallace. Movie fans are damn happy that we live…
Are you a die-hard, complete immersion festie? Did you take the week off of work so that you’d be able to see all of these great movies? We salute you. Whether you’re planted in those seats from beginning to end, or just catching what you can this evening, we’ve got…
It’s the perfect day to hunker down at DIFF, so our staff crunched the schedule and created a game plan. Here’s your guide to today’s indies, docs and features. Click the film titles for background information…
The Dallas 2012 Dallas International Film Festival kicks off its boots tomorrow and starts that film ferris wheel a-rolling for 11 days of features, docs, shorts, animated films, awards, Q&As, talk shows, panels and of course plenty of star spotting and people watching (it is Dallas after all). Here are…
At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really. The real spoilers in the film are in the tricky mechanics crafted by writers Joss Whedon…
The latest phantasmagoria of cinematic quotation from Canadian director Guy Maddin, Keyhole is an extremely loose adaptation of the Odyssey. Jason Patric plays Ulysses Pick, leader of a two-bit gang who, carrying a nearly drowned girl on his back, returns home after a long absence. With his criminal accomplices confined…
Before he directed the comic-lover’s box set staple, the Spider-Man trilogy, Sam Raimi was a low-budget collaborator. We are all better humans because of this. Had he never been an errant hair in the film industry’s arm pit we wouldn’t have Evil Dead I and II, and “boom stick” wouldn’t…
