Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…
The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
In his latest movie, How to Be a Latin Lover, Eugenio Derbez stars as a man who’s learning the hard way that as he ages, he’s no longer able to get by on charm alone. Derbez, who also produced the movie, clearly wasn’t picked for the lead role because of…
A lot has changed in the two years since the last Dallas Medianale. In March 2015, the new experimental media arts festival closed two months of screenings, exhibitions and performances at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC), promising to return biennially. Dallas Medianale is preparing to keep that promise later this…
“You can’t describe music with words,” the great Sonny Rollins observes in John Scheinfeld’s survey-course-brisk docu-dip into the art and life of John Coltrane. As if seeking to prove Rollins right, Scheinfeld’s interviewees hold themselves to generalities: “His sound is stunning,” observes appreciator-in-chief Bill Clinton, who adds, unilluminatingly, that it…
No matter your opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person, you can’t deny this: The man is a doer. And in Elliott Lester’s grief drama Aftermath, the ripped Renaissance man does a subtle, absorbing performance of despair so unlike his other work that his lined and laden face at times…
Somebody at Warners must’ve seen Going in Style, the 1979 film about old men robbing a bank, and decided that a happier, peppier version could be profitable. The original has no less than George Burns, Jackie Gleason sidekick Art Carney and method-acting legend Lee Strasberg as old fogies who decide…
It’s a good thing Jonathan Banks has such an interesting face. At the beginning of the third season of Better Call Saul, we spend a lot of quiet time with Banks’ surly, crooked-nosed cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut of Breaking Bad fame, watching as he dismantles his own car and works out…
In Netflix’s new teen-suicide drama series 13 Reasons Why, pretty-boy Marcus (Steven Silver) tells good-guy Clay (Dylan Minnette) that whatever the kids did to Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) to make her kill herself was no different than what happens to any other girl in any other high school everywhere. And…
Whether you’ve been movie hopping for a week or plan to catch your first eyeful of DIFF this weekend, you’ll get a fresh crop of films filling the screens plus a chance for a few encores. Voting is currently underway for all of this year’s plucky competition categories, and the…
Catch up on prior seasons of Vanderpump Rules on Hulu. Part one of the season five reunion airs Monday, April 3 on Bravo. Detractors of reality TV pooh-pooh the genre as a vacuous cesspool that celebrates crass idiocy and normalizes bad behavior that leads to societal horrors like our current…
If civilization were to end tomorrow — and who the hell knows, it just might — we could learn a lot about building the next one from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. Back in 1998, the Japanese director had his U.S. breakthrough with the wildly acclaimed After Life. Since then,…
Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first day of shooting for the horror film What Ever…
This April, let us celebrate the glory of the flowers blossoming in vaginal fashion by only highlighting shows created by women. The list will be shorter than usual because Hollywood hates women, and we aren’t allowed to create magical stuff, and the world is worse off because of it. Anyways,…
The premise for Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery is so simple and poetic that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before: A scientist discovers definitive proof of an afterlife, and the world responds with mass suicides. McDowell, who scored a sleeper hit with The One I Love — which…
Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be. This big-budget adaptation of the Japanese manga and anime classic (Masamune Shirow’s comic premiered in the late 1980s, Mamoru Oshii’s highly influential first film version in 1995)…
Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
Actor Khary Payton has come a long way from his days as a theater student performing Shakespeare at Southern Methodist University. He’s still playing majestic kings, only these days he’s doing it on The Walking Dead, where his role is King Ezekiel, a benevolent ruler who keeps a tiger as…
Having now reached the age of its wayward protagonist, Donnie Darko is once again being tasked with forestalling the end of the world. Richard Kelly’s sleeper first opened almost two years after screening at Sundance, and a month after 9/11, becoming an early example of a trend that scarcely exists…
There’s a lot to navigate in Dallas International Film Festival’s 2017 line-up. But what if — between the human rights documentaries, dark family dramas and ready access to booze — you just want to chill out and watch something funny? Well, you’re in luck there too. We’ve got five of ’em…
