Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly — Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some movies have special meaning for people even if they don’t turn up on lists of established favorites. They’re the secret movies we keep in our pockets like…
Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn’t stop Vladimir Putin’s government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the…
Fans of punk, DIY, transgressive and avant-garde cinema, brace yourself: Tonight, ancient seals will be blown open as the millimeter offerings of Texas Theatre drop from a trustworthy 35 to 16 and even — wait for it… Super 8. A gambling pool has started regarding what, exactly, will happen when…
The Texas Theatre has become a cultural anchor amid the shifting tides of Oak Cliff, and the Oak Cliff Film Festival is fast becoming an important part of the beer-pouring, 35MM-spooling theater’s diverse arsenal. This year’s sophomore version, which opens Thursday, will only further secure that anchor. Dallas’ small film…
Los Angeles artist Andre Perkowski is a cinematic meddler. He rifles through public domain film footage picking out the bits he likes, then he weaves them together into montages and full-length works. One of the most interestingly Frankensteined of them all arrives in Dallas Saturday night for the Oak Cliff…
May Now You See Me, 5/31: Action filmmaker Louis Leterrier’s output is all over the map, from the fitfully delightful Transporter 2 to that irredeemable Clash of the Titans remake. His latest sounds pretty dopey — the FBI tries to stop a group of bank-robbing magicians — but Leterrier, the…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
There’s a thing that sometimes happens to copy editors, the workhorses who do the final grammar cleanup, general fine-tuning and, sometimes, miracle-working before a story goes to print: An editor higher on the food chain will receive a disheveled manuscript from a writer, make a few halfhearted tweaks and pass…
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie — like the posters and commercials — won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the…
Before Van Wilder flashed his glamor grin and Accepted achieved its cult accreditation; before Frank the Tank went streaking in the quad, Pivon threw meat on protesters and a house of nerds out-competed the Alpha Betas with an electric violin, there was the original: Animal House. This 35-year-old salute to…
The greatest film ever made about a time-traveling DeLorean soundtracked by Huey Lewis will screen for free in the Arts District’s Strauss Square on Sunday, June 2. It’s the next installment of the popular (and BYOB) Sunset Screening film series. Reserve tables and lawn seats to watch it here. The…
The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy’s comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” without anyone ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and…
There are times during the affecting tumult of What Maisie Knew when you may think, “At last, a first-rate American movie about what being a kid actually feels like!” And then there are times when, despite the scrupulousness of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s adherence to the perspective of…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Not only are we, like we’re sure you are, genuinely excited about the return of Arrested Development on May 26, we also have absolutely no idea what will happen. The family, those blowhards, could be scattered around the globe, and indeed initial reports suggested that there wouldn’t be a massive…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a 12-year-old girl borne away toward rape and misery, or a penis doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. All three of those things happen…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
Thought all subcultures were already tapped for reality television? Guess again. A new program is gaining momentum and intends to fill its cast with our favorite obsessives, The Nerds of Earth. The Quest has been described by its creator as “Amazing Race in Middle-Earth” and takes its potential crew on…
Before they were strangers who decided to stop being polite and start getting real, the cast members of Real World were just stars in waiting. MTV’s iconic staple of reality television is now casting for Season 29. The show’s vetters will be in Dallas at Redrock Bar and Grill on…
