Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi–road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff is that and more—one great leap into the 19th-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train crossing the Oregon Trail in 1845 follow their bombastic, wrong-headed…
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman most lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it’s the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dude-centric point of view. It’s also…
Greatly expanded from a four-page, single-situation story by Raymond Carver, Dan Rush’s first feature, Everything Must Go, is an ambitious if enervated vehicle for Will Ferrell—playing it straight as Nick Halsey, a middle-class drunk fired from his job and locked out of his suburban home by an irate, never-seen spouse…
Dr. Phil McGraw will speak at the University of North Texas’ doctoral and masters commencement ceremony on Friday. The event is free and open to the public, and will be live-streamed online here.Presumably, the good doctor will reminisce about his halcyon days at the university, where he got his doctorate…
Tim Hetherington, the photojournalist and documentarian killed in Libya on April 20, was scheduled to speak at tomorrow’s Oak Cliff Texas Theatre screening of his Oscar-nominated Afghanistan war documentary, Restrepo. Following the tragic and untimely death of the photographer who risked his life to bring all aspects of conflict to…
An earnest, intermittently droll dramedy about a manic-depressive toy manufacturer and his bewildered family, The Beaver is a parable that’s not easily parsed. While director Jodie Foster fails to maintain a consistent tone, the movie’s lopsided wobble is undeniably enhanced by her star Mel Gibson, or at least by the…
Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal), and produced by Hilary Swank in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack—one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this tale of…
“This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…
Anthropomorphizing its animal stars to a borderline dubious degree, Disneynature’s nonfiction African Cats situates itself in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, where two four-legged mothers valiantly struggle to provide for and protect their young. On the northern side of the river that divides this gorgeous but pitiless land lives aging…
When charged with making a documentary about a subject whose work is far more interesting than his life, how does a filmmaker proceed? If you’re Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, directors of American: The Bill Hicks Story, a portrait of the acerbic stand-up comic who died of pancreatic cancer in…
Tender irony and dark humor abound in The Human Resources Manager, Israeli director Eran Riklis’ latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion. This follow-up to 2008’s Lemon Tree, based on the novel A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua, hits the road when the restless personnel director (Mark Ivanir)…
When a local crime boss (Kevin Bacon) lures away his wife (Liv Tyler), lifelong pushover Frank (Rainn Wilson)—under the influence of a bizarre Christian kids’ TV show and a sci-fi-style encounter with something like God—starts to make himself over into a real-life superhero. On discovering that the weird guy who…
Set in the months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s Theater—specifically, the trial of Mary Surratt, Catholic, 42, and the owner of a Washington, D.C., boarding house, who was presented before a military tribunal as the den mother in the…
A U.N. premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Co. and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel’s bait, it bears…
The era of the teenage action heroine is fully upon us. As pop-cultural correctives go, it’s a mixed blessing. In one corner, you’ve got the jailbait fantasies of Donkey Punch and Kick Ass, which eagerly trade on notions of naughty girliness rather than transcend or interrogate them. In the other,…
Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly contemporary-sounding blue humor, blunt profanity replacing the naughty-naughty, tankard-sloshing, heaving-bosom ribaldry that goes with the period setting. The scene: a generic medieval realm from an EverQuest or Forgotten Realms module…
Moon director Duncan Jones’ sophomore feature, Source Code—a pseudo-cerebral, modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller with ambitions more Philip K. Dick-like in scope than the recent Dick adaptation The Adjustment Bureau—is a propulsive ride worth your popcorn dollar, not for its preposterous genre tinkering but for its refreshingly humanist take on a…
There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside an ominous house, a trenchcoat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey—you, dear viewer. A married couple, Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), are…
Last year, the question most often asked of Dallas International Film Festival artistic director James Faust was, “What’s this year’s The Hurt Locker?”—a reference, of course, to Kathryn Bigalow’s wrenching Iraq bomb-squad nail-biter that had one of its earliest screenings at the 2009 fest then called the AFI Dallas International…
With post-GoodFellas crime-movie tropes dyed for St. Patrick’s Day, this Ballad of Danny Greene attempts to enshrine the Irish-American strongman, a real-life folk hero among mob-lore nerds and Cleveland Teamsters for his Rasputin-like resilience through multiple assassination attempts. Kill the Irishman aims to come out bumping chests in upstart insouciance,…
The tale of a disoriented cannibal family trying to survive in the lower depths of Mexico City, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is a darkly comic social allegory as well as an atmospheric little genre flick. This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the…
Paul Giamatti continues contemporary cinema’s longest pre-midlife crisis in Win Win as Mike, yet another schlubby fortysomething flummoxed by mundane personal problems. Mike is the coach of the county’s worst high school wrestling team, and his failing small-town law practice has accrued a mountain of debt, which he’s too chicken-shit…
