It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been more than a decade since my mom bought my friends and I tickets to American Pie, on accounts of us being freshman in high school at the time and unable to see anything on our own that had two boobies and…
A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the Wind-style cinematic event that the millennials could call their own. Now Titanic has bobbed to the surface yet again in a 3-D re-release, making a play for an audience…
The Kid With a Bike, the new film from Belgian art-house legends Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, begins with Cyril, a scrappy 11-year-old living in an urban orphanage and making what is apparently his umpteenth unsuccessful attempt to reach his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier) by phone. Dad promised to come back…
Lean, fast-moving and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans’ Indonesian martial arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype and the buzz it generated at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a fortysomething Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his sixtysomething father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
Every week Texas Theatre finds a truly terrible movie and screens it as Tuesday Night Trash. Tonight’s selection, Samurai Cop, is the warm gum stuck to the loafer of Hollywood producer Amir Shervan. Try as he might to scrape it off on a rock, evidence of its existence will live…
Hold your hats and get ready to DIFF. Dallas International Film Festival begins on April 12 but started its roundtable discussions this afternoon at Private Social with Sironia’s Thomas Ward (screenwriter, actor) and Brendon Dickerson (director, writer). “Career suicide” is the exact phrase used by Dickerson’s Los Angeles friends when…
Between The Hulk screaming at our faces in 3-D and Batman possibly breaking his spine in IMAX, it’s going to be a fairly epic year in blockbuster cinema. Yet, if you’re scheduling your year of movie patronage based solely on the trailers (and not the incessant Rotten Tomatoes picking), then…
Do you love frenetic, high-flying gun-slinging, sword-slashing Asian cinema? Well, we’ve got what you crave. Mixmaster is giving away a pair of tickets for tomorrow’s (Friday, March 22) 8:15 p.m. screening of Let The Bullets Fly. This new release by Vendetta Films stars action guru Chow Yun Fat. Here’s the…
“If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’ astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
Those excavators of fallen frocks over at the Vintagemobile have rotary-dialed the Angelika Theater and planned a date. Beginning this Sunday you can plummet into the soulless sinkhole of Don Draper’s eyes enhanced by a hundred when the Angelika presents Mad Men Season 5 on the big screen. There will…
I know what you’re thinking: “Penitentiary III? But Penitentiary II has Mr. T.” Oh, you weren’t thinking that? Well, that’s because you have a life and a soul and that little thing in your head that tells you when to stop watching terrible movies. On behalf of everyone else, Penitentiary…
Adaptations of TV shows on the silver screen is nothing new (1966’s Batman with the original caped crusader, Adam West, and 1955’s Marty with Ernest Borgnine are two early ones that come to mind) and I wouldn’t expect them to stop anytime soon, with TV to movie flicks like Mission:Impossible,…
The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 and ran until 1991, launching the career of Johnny Depp (who cameos here). As a sign of the irrefutable progress made since the fear-mongering, anti-hedonist Reagan-Bush era, the mixed-bag, big-screen 21…
It’s obvious that Jason Segel has a face for comedy. He has a lumpy, sad-sack mug with a dozen inflections to register disappointment, confusion and self-doubt. But as the basement-dwelling hero in the Duplass brothers’ new quest movie, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Segel works his entire posture for laughs…
The Oscar-nominated animated musical Chico & Rita opens with a jaw-dropping swoop over modern-day Cuba, a well-grimed and bustling island of densely packed buildings that, here, is immaculately detailed and tinted just so as to make it beam even in squalor. Chico & Rita deserves credit for being the rare…
Boom from Daniel Matyas on Vimeo.Twenty-three selections were accepted into the SXSW Film Festival’s High School Short Film category, but only one was able to win the prize. It went to Boom, the creepily fun love child of Addison’s own Daniel Matyas, Andrew Fields and Brian Broder. The boys all…
THIS VIDEO IS NSFW. Working for Troma is the adult version of your childhood “I want to go to Space Camp!” dream. When your family explained how much the astronaut retreat would cost, you had to admit defeat. That was the year you spent in front of the Betamax watching…
Starving, stark raving Hunger Gamers commandeered the Galleria Dallas last night, fiending for just a glimpse of Josh Hutercherson (Peeta), Isabelle Fuhrman (Clove) and Jacqueline Emerson (Foxface) – a few of the stars from the upcoming big screen adaptation of the popular book trilogy. And the cast might as well…
Renaissance man Will Ferrell was stopped by SMU last night on his way down to SXSW to give one lucky audience a peek at his new, all Spanish language telenovela, Casa de mi Padre. Did I mention it’s entirely in Español? Si, es cierto! Seriously, I think Will is just…
Recording “Les Filles du Crazy,” an anthem that they’ll later lip-synch onstage, half a dozen women — performers at the Crazy Horse, Paris’ classy nudie cabaret — sing of themselves, “They are the soldiers of the erotic army.” The military metaphor proves apt, as Frederick Wiseman’s spellbinding documentary on the…
In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion on the bedside table of Jason (Adam Scott) marks him as a nonbeliever. His doubt also extends to conjugal matters, for he is unconvinced that married parents could ever be happy. Sharing…
