Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking if you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live Free…
As he’s questioned by a therapist in the opening scene of the film bearing his name, we see Charles Swan III’s subconscious literally spurt out of his head. It’s visualized as an animated collage largely made up of ladies’ long, disembodied legs. It also indicates writer-director Roman Coppola’s approach with…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Before anything else, here’s how dumb things get in A Good Day for Die Hard–Related Media Product, which is being sold as a bang-bang movie sequel so that nobody catches onto its true nature: a black-ops experiment testing the human faculty for discovering coherent patterns in unrelated shards of image…
Child characters endowed with adult intelligence tend to be disappointing puppets through which authors articulate their own views. But allowing a brilliant fictional child her own voice and agency (not to mention age-appropriate behavior) represents this whole other imaginative leap — riskier, but way more interesting and rewarding if actually…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. The Master Screens Friday, Saturday, and…
I wanted to hate last night’s episode of Girls, which begins with Hannah and Ray discussing the origins of the word “sexit,” defined by Hannah as two people leaving a party to have sex. After following Joshua (Patrick Wilson) — a customer who complained about the coffee shop Ray and…
This weekend, February 9-10, fans of all things sci-fi will descend upon the Irving Convention Center for this year’s Sci-Fi Expo. Major guests will be in attendance, including comic book artists and actors from popular sci-fi films and TV shows. The roster includes stars from Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead,…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller revolving around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
To watch Melissa McCarthy as lovable chef Sookie St. James on seven seasons of the Gilmore Girls was to see an actress perfect the art of playing a sidekick. As best friend of the show’s protagonist, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), McCarthy dutifully provided comic relief and a shoulder on which…
“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always worked with writers whose voices are so specific that there really isn’t any way to recalibrate things without them being intimately involved,” says Steven Soderbergh as he swivels in a chair in the happily cluttered Flatiron District loft space that doubles as his…
Now in its 6th year, the Thin Line Film Fest brings 11 days of documentary goodness to the streets of Denton. If you were burned in your youth with preachy docs that couldn’t hold your attention, it’s time to re-explore the medium. Thin Line guides you through the best of…
Netflix added a new television series called House of Cards to its streaming library last Friday. Starring Kevin Spacey and developed by Hollywood heavyweight David Fincher (Fight Club, Social Network), the series is a political thriller based on a 1990 BBC series of the same name. But what makes this…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. The Breakfast Club Screens Friday and…
How should we feel about a main character who is willing to peel away the layers and show us the worst possible version of themselves? I suppose that’s what made Walter White so engaging as the anti-hero of Breaking Bad, or why Laura Dern’s anxious, naive Amy Jellicoe is so…
Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys, and the identical humiliations visited up Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems that Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into…
Being a lucky guy, I’ve only been kicked in the balls once. How did it rate on the comedy scale? Well, it was funnier than a monologue by Chelsea Handler, but not quite as hilarious as my last screening for colorectal cancer. Yet despite the fact that this act hurts…
Charlie Sheen lives in a big yellow house on a T-shaped intersection in the middle of a fake neighborhood in a gated community off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. When I arrive there on a Saturday afternoon in January, I am intercepted in Sheen’s driveway by a security guard, a…
Shortly after independant writer-director Coley Sohn learned that her first short film, Boutonniere, had been accepted for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, a filmmaking friend of hers warned her: People will want to know what’s next. With that in mind, Sohn began work on a feature-length idea about a mascot,…
Every Wednesday, we find you five movies to watch over the coming weekend, from new theater releases to weird screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. The Oscar Nominated Shorts Films 2013: Animated and Live Action Opens…
