The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the U.K. miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds, representing a dismal and damaging period in late-20th-century British history — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the…
The Dallas VideoFest falls just before Halloween. A spooky season worth tapping into, at least for one of the fest’s signature events. “We thought maybe we should go in a Halloween direction,” says Brian Satterwhite, a composer and film aficionado who served as a consultant for this year’s live silent…
The historic Texas Theatre prides itself on being one of the few movie houses in town that can still screen films in their original 35mm and even 16mm formats, but even this historic theater has to change with the times and that means making the jump to digital distribution. Such…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, open this week’s podcast with a brief discussion of Twin Peaks, which comes back to TV via a series on Showtime in 2016, and move onto The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall,…
Another October means movie theaters yet again rolling out the orange carpet for their Halloween themed programming, and since we are the foremost experts of Halloweenocity in the area, we pulled all the best screenings together for you. Weirdly enough no one is showing John Carpenter’s Halloween this year, which…
I spent last night at the fabulous Texas Theatre watching 20,000 Days on Earth, the new documentary about legendary Australian songsmith Nick Cave. You need to go and see it there before its extremely limited run closes on Thursday, and here is why. First off, it’s not even really a…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
Everything about Gone Girl, David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s enormously popular 2012 thriller about a deteriorating marriage and a wife gone missing, is precise and thoughtful — it’s as well planned as the perfect murder, with its share of vicious, shivery delights. But at the end of the perfect…
Should we trust artists to tell the story of artists? On the plus side, who understands them better? If there’s a secret language of imagination and creativity, then the members of this sprawling tribe must be the ones who speak it best. On the other hand, could there be anything…
Every child who’s thrown a tantrum, packed a bag and plotted to run away has shivered with the same vengeful thought: I wish I could see how sad they’ll be when I’m gone. The Left Behind franchise implies that evangelicals haven’t grown up. This new film version, the latest in…
In one Nick Cave song, a pedophiliac outlaw caps a murder spree by killing the devil himself. In another, the narrator muses on Miley Cyrus while seeking the “God particle” down a boulevard lined with burning trees. Cave is fluent in apocalyptic imagery and the Bible; his songs are filled…
Annabelle, an effective prequel to horror pastiche The Conjuring, surpasses its predecessor simply by virtue of occasionally being scary. Both films are over-reliant on deafening sound effects and side-eye glimpses of underwhelming ghosts. But Annabelle’s scare scenes are better paced and more thoughtfully lensed. Its hokey, funhouse-worthy spooks — a…
Yesterday, D Magazine’s Frontburner blog got their fingers sticky in some scoop batter via the boob tube. The Internet’s cutest repetitive Preschooler, the “Apparently Kid” got his first reporting gig from Ellen Degeneres, who is sending him to cover the State Fair of Texas. On a scale of 1 to…
First, we had Scott Schuman and his collection of photographs, The Sartorialist. Then came the onslaught of fashion, DIY, and lifestyle blogs. We loved it. We still love it. Don’t tell you don’t check Refinery29 every morning (or that you’re not following them on Facebook and Instagram), or that you…
As Bob McCall in The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays a regular Joe who turns into an eye-gouging, brain-drilling nightmare for Boston’s Russian mob. At first Washington “toodles about a Home Depot-like store, helping customers, decked out in New Balance shoes and jeans so last-century you’ll be looking for pleats,” writes…
When The Brittany Murphy Story aired on Lifetime earlier this month, articles upon articles slammed the movie for its bad acting, bad wigs, and ultimately bad writing (surprise!). But among all of the negative press, actor Adam Hagenbuch seemed to receive the most praise for his portrayal of Murphy’s boyfriend,…
The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German Expressionists were skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on a…
Before its regular-Joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…
Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…
Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…
