We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
The eighth episode of this season of The Bachelor aired last night, which for every season means the chosen Bachelor visits his remaining ladies’ hometowns, which means he probably meets an over-protective father and possibly too-drunk-for-TV mother. Last night was no different. The ladies paraded Bachelor Ben around their hometowns…
In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…
Benicio Del Toro has the basset-hound look of a beast you can trust — or, at least, he’ll happily admit when he’s lying. He’s the right man for a rotten world, with heavy-lidded, handsome eyes made for giving any tough spot an appraising squint. Recently, he’s played a string of…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
Listen: James Franco has come unstuck in time. In the TV-MA debut (there are many, many excellent F-bombs) of 11.22.63, the Hulu miniseries partly shot in Dallas, James Franco is bouncing back and forth between present day and 11:58 a.m. on October 21, 1960. Chris Cooper is there, coughing. A…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
Marie Reyes opens her front door to her Preston Hollow home and welcomes her 10-year-old daughter home from school. “Hey, there. How was your early Valentine’s Day?” Sofia, who was picked up from school by the family’s housekeeper, trots in wearing her Hockaday School uniform and carrying her Valentines. A…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…
Stop working. Stop talking. Stop everything. Stand up. Stretch. This is our time, Dallas. And by “our time,” we mean Bravo announced the Real Housewives of Dallas cast, so buckle up, bitches, because RHOD wasn’t just some weird nightmare you had. It’s actually happening. Really, really happening. Are you scared?…
Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…
A guy I grew up with had the superpower to make anything dirty. No matter what you’d say to him, he’d manage to make it about his dick, or about anal sex, or about how girls — so he had heard — smelled like fish. I asked him what he…
“I’ve turned into this kind of crazy optimist,” Michael Moore admits in his new documentary Where to Invade Next, his first film in six years. At 61, the gadfly savant has mellowed. Instead of charging into rooms, he shuffles, the American flag wrapped around his shoulders like a grandmother’s shawl…
The new Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in The Cedars is, in a word, awesome. The second Alamo in Dallas-Fort Worth is located on South Lamar and the view of the city skyline from the front doors is absolutely majestic. In the lobby, there is an enormous film poster of Robocop, which…
On November 11, 1991, the late King of Pop Michael Jackson released the instant-hit song “Black or White.” It is one the most notable and important songs in his oeuvre because it addresses issues we will be fighting until the world implodes and cats take over: racial and gender issues…
The biggest story at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was the record-breaking bidding war for The Birth of a Nation, a prestige biopic about rebellious slave Nat Turner. When Fox Searchlight snatched it for $17.5 million — $5 million more than any other flick in the festival’s history — their…
