The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grown-ups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star–two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex into their…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways—and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh and in others…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
Shout!FactoryThe cast of Fridays Whether you love it or hate it these days, it’s still tough to compete against Saturday Night Live. Although the show certainly has seen much better and much funnier days, you still can’t knock it off its perch after all these years. The powers that be…
As we’ve previously reported, Halt & Catch Fire is the product of Plano native Chris Cantwell, and it focuses the personal computing boom of the 1980s in tech-rich Dallas. The show filmed a pilot for AMC this year, and even fixed up a the iconic Neon Big Tex sign on…
The lobby in Richardson’s new Alamo Drafthouse is still just bare concrete and metal, but they’ve already held what would, for any other theater, be an event almost impossible to top. Starting at seven, over two hundred lucky contest winners were ushered inside to an intimate auditorium decked out with…
The above trailer is for an actual movie about old guys partying in Vegas, coming to your local cineplex on November 1. (Sample joke: “Do you have any drugs?” “Does Lipitor count?”) (Sample reaction: throws self into nearest sinkhole.) But Last Vegas isn’t the last Vegas movie coming your way…
Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but that will no doubt…
Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it’s already a relic of a bygone era — a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That’s the central irony of the Must-See TV show’s legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine — bony, loping, a little shaggy — and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and…
Liz OhanesianJ.G. Quintel, creator of Regular Show, left, meets Muscle Man come to life. J.G. Quintel has been going to San Diego Comic-Con for a decade now. He started out his journey here as a fan, a CalArts student who caught wind of the event from his brother. Quintel would…
Update: We’ve been asking for your SyFy film suggestions today and I gotta say: I’d greenlight all of these. Check out our favorite reader’s ideas for new Sharknado follow-up projects. They’re at the bottom. I love crap. According to trending polls, you do too. Case in point: rip-off monster movie…
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a BART transit officer. The officer later claimed that he meant to reach for his Taser and…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that depiction implies. We can’t really envision an afterlife that isn’t somehow modeled on our own psychic landscape. So…
You can make the free movie rounds each weekend in July, thanks to Downtown Dallas Inc. and Alamo Drafthouse Richardson. DDI announced its newest community-building project yesterday, a migrating outdoor summer film series set to occupy four different downtown spaces over the next month. The Friday night collection has a…
It’s easy to sit at home and play along with a trivia game show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and believe you could breeze through the questions to the $1 million bounty. Actually trying out for a shot to be considered for a seat in that cushy, purple…
Twelve years ago the Asian Film Festival of Dallas was an informal gathering housed in donated spaces. Promotional materials consisted of black-and-white xerox hand-outs and raw enthusiasm. Since then it’s grown and matured into a destination festival with sponsorship by McDonald’s and Well Go USA, a distribution company specializing in…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
A bewitching helix of pure movie stuff, Peter Strickland’s seething and self-conscious whatsit Berberian Sound Studio may scan as a psychological thriller, but it’s really a lavish gift to film geeks in a lovely matryoshka box. We haven’t been here before: the Italian film industry circa 1976, in that post-dubbing-craze…
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv-comedians-turned-actors-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all of the characters in The Way, Way…
