Toby Halbrooks is on a roll. The local film producer and director is an integral part of the film community quietly earning Dallas a reputation. For the second year in a row, Halbrooks will return to Sundance Film Festival in 2014 with two projects. Last year he co-produced Shane Carruth’s…
In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funny men, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela has long been shorthand for the things Mandela shows…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
For professional film critics, you’ll notice, the year in film tends to conclude prematurely. Those “Best Of” lists you see popping up everywhere around now have often been tallied, decided, and finalized by mid-November — and in the web’s ever-harried race for clicks and pageviews, that date seems to be…
All photos courtesy of Sony PicturesStory by Vanessa Martin American Hustle, directed and co-written by David O. Russell, is undeniably the must-watch film this holiday season. With outstanding performances by an A-list cast (Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence), the period film is loosely based on the…
Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is a broke, rumpled…
The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They’re not necessarily dishonest; they just can’t resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell’s extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what…
The audience that shows up for a comedy is the most tyrannical of all. Their very presence is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully’s challenge: “Go ahead — make me laugh.” Which is why there’s danger in following up a hit comedy with a sequel, even nine years after the…
How stubborn was Walt Disney? He spent 26 years wheedling Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book — call it determination or bullying. Travers thought he was a hack who would louse up her story with cartoon penguins. Walt thought she was a…
Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
The all-star film version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County opens here January 10 (postponed from December 25, which means we have to suffer our own horrible relatives all Christmas day instead of escaping to spend time with Letts’ fictional ones). Meryl Streep tops the cast list…
The calendar’s date is usually arbitrary when retro movie screenings are concerned. But in the case of Camp Crystal Lake, Friday the 13th is the only day that really matters. The Alamo Drafthouse keeps an eye on such things and it saw today as an opportunity for a sort-of film…
In 2013, love came in many forms: girl on zombie, boy on smartphone, and James Franco on — count ’em — two hot bikini babes at the same damn time. Sure, romantic comedies are as extinct as Oprah Winfrey’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, but…
Bronx-born filmmaker Abel Ferrara considers all of his fiction films to be documentaries: What you see is what happened in the moment that was shot. That mentality informed the making of Ms. 45, Ferrara’s characteristically complex 1981 rape-revenge drama. In the film, a mute teenager (Zoë Lund) copes with being…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarves. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
Some movies come barreling out of their caves like armies on the sociocultural warpath, self-consciously defining themselves as psychographic events, marking The Way Things Are Now and becoming part of history in the process. Given the ambition, we should embrace these rare explosions when they happen, even more so now…
Christmas is coming up and if you’re having trouble buying a gift for that hardcore movie buff in your life and you have a few thousand dollars just taking up real estate in your couch cushions, Heritage Auctions of Dallas may have a solution. The local auction house is getting…
We recently treated you to the news that seven different theaters in the Dallas area screen Die Hard in December. And you, dear reader, grew excited, because nothing quite says “Happy Holidays” like John McClain scribbling “Now I have a machine gun. HO HO HO” on a terrorist’s corpse. That…
Imports, muscle cars and general machines of inspiration will rev their engines in non-silent salute to Paul Walker tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson. The event was organized to honor the film star who passed away on Saturday, November 30 at age 40. Walker did more with his career…
