It’s got to be one of the most challenging things to achieve in cinema history: How do you truly frighten the hell out of a movie audience? These days, in the Internet age, wherein we meticulously dissect films for accurate representations of reality and feasibility, it’s hilariously difficult. But when…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were just, like, 10 years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
Let’s get right down to business: the Lone Star Film Festival announced its 2015 lineup, and it’s big. Here’s a fresh reminder from last year: they screened It Follows, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Great Invisible, The Imitation Game, Mr. Turner, Wild, Winter Sleep, and…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014. In both novel and movie, American astronaut Mark Watney…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows 11-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t been born…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
The minds of math and science geniuses have long fascinated the makers of crowd-pleasing narrative features, which is curious, as the complexities that fascinate those minds are antithetical to the feelings-first bounce of popular filmmaking. The movies, having settled into candied naturalism, already struggle to suggest interiority, even of characters…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer-director Nancy Meyers’s The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
In the mid-20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those movies…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s , which tells the story of Cold War–era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good. In…
Serving Second Chances begins with a gorgeous shot of the Dallas skyline before the camera pans down to a man sleeping on a bench in front of City Hall. During a Robert Johnson lookalike contest at The Stewpot, guitarist Gerald Williams showed up out of nowhere and won first prize…
LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson found out first-hand that Michael Shannon is a pretty stern Monopoly player during a recent game with the actor, who portrays a tortured Orlando real-estate baron in the upcoming 99 Homes. Nicholson and Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl open this week’s Voice Film…
Despite a vibrant and burgeoning film community here in Dallas (thanks Dallas Film Society, Texas Theatre, Video Association of Dallas and the many, many others who make it happen) we tend to pay a great deal of attention to what’s new while more or less neglecting the old. We can…
The success of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s handsome lupine adventure Wolf Totem relies in large part on the ratio between wolf and totem. There are wolves — those howling, majestic hunters of the Mongolian grasslands — and then there are the many things they stand for: freedom, teamwork, the delicate harmony of…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
The American Dream killed Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, but their TV counterparts have mostly fared better. Sure, Walter White ends up in a metaphorical ditch and Tony Soprano may too. But the serialization of TV storytelling largely means that characters on shows like Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,…
The upcoming Steve Jobs documentary from Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) is worth seeing even if you’re tired of Apple fanboys — if only for the curious parallels between Apple worshippers and the members of the Church of Scientology, the subject of Gibney’s other recent doc…
There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
