The Amazing Spider-Man, an inexcusably good reboot-thing from director Marc Webb, celebrates the heartwarming arachno-genetic bar mitzvah in which a boy becomes a spider, and a spider becomes a man, a rite of passage last observed in Sam Raimi’s uneven but often pretty great trilogy in the aughts. And there’s…
In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny, middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…
“Welcome to the recession, boys,” says John Travolta’s DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone’s Savages, based on Don Winslow’s novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there’s really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry — that…
A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana-set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film’s 6-year-old (also Wallis’ age during filming) protagonist and…
There’s no doubt that you know the name Chris Pine. He is of course the leading man who made Captain James Tiberius Kirk synonymous with cool again. And the name Alex Kurtzman might not ring a bell, but it should. After all, he is the writer who made Star Trek…
The tense moments came fast and furious during the fourth episode of the new Dallas this week, making us salivate – no, downright drool – for the moment that J.R. finally reclaims control of Southfork Ranch. We’re supposed to be rooting for the bad guy, right? Because it’s a hell…
When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike — which the actor conceived of and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening…
Fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the…
The DeLorean, Bond’s DB5, the Bandit’s Trans Am. Sometimes it’s an iconic car that makes a movie as much as Reynolds’ mustache or Connery’s brogue. (Did Bullitt even have a plot? Your guess is as good as ours.) Well, this just in, today from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m., you can…
Hey Dallas lady, you seem really sweet but you didn’t need Bethenny’s advice about “shaking things up” today to “shake things up.” You just did it. By Skyping your way onto a national talk show, you have guaranteed that everyone who knows you or your boyfriend of ten years are…
After last week’s uneven, unintentionally comical premiere (“I never SENT you an EEEEEE-MAIL.”), TNT’s re-launch of Dallas hit a gusher on Wednesday (isn’t that what the oil people say when they do well?). J.R. Ewing, like, TOOK-OVER took over. Asses were kicked, names taken, delicious one-liners uttered. He began his…
Apocalypse movies are a venerable enough genre (and reliable enough as box-office cash spigots) to support a few lightweight, funny-sad-romantic entries every once in a while. Given the right touch, this approach can be just the antidote to the idea-free, effects-laden blockbusters and art-house pity parties that dominate the form…
Beginning with a bilious toast and ending with a group hug, Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister, her fourth film, expertly makes us squirm for about half its running time only to soothe us with empty pop-psych declarations. In Shelton’s previous feature, the bolder Humpday, two straight guys, in a moment…
The logical outer limit of the whole horror-as-metaphor thing, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shoehorns the entire personal history of the 16th president into mega-budget The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires chop-socky/grind house schlock, and casts the seditious South as a nation of slave-sucking undead. “History,” narrates Abe (Benjamin Walker),…
The first film from émigré director Pawel Pawlikowski since 2004’s dreamy My Summer of Love, this thoroughly odd and brooding psycho-puzzle trains in on Ethan Hawke’s displaced American writer-academic, arrived in Paris to see his ex-wife and young daughter despite a restraining order, a recent hospital stay and a history…
For all its flash and bling, Dallas is a pretty easy city to do on the cheap. Take this weekend: With the Oak Cliff Film Fest in town, cinematic scavengers can feast on five freebie scraps at both outdoor and indoor viewings. Over at Strauss Square, you’re invited to RSVP…
With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell hot. But in an unusual twist for a twentysomething performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza’s natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress — she hasn’t…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated as a stage production, first…
Don’t panic. The two-hour premiere of the relaunched Dallas hasn’t started yet. Right now on TNT … let’s see … we’ve got an old episode of Law & Order that we’ve probably all slept through five times. … Yep, I’ve dreamed about Jesse L. Martin telling someone to “sit yo…
The clothes. The backstabbing. The most insidious family tree ever planted in an oil field. It’s “Dallas,” and it’s back. Wednesday night we’ll see if the three-decade morality struggle between J.R. and Bobby grows richer when legacy gifted to their heirs as our favorite Texas-centric melodrama picks back up in…
Welcome back, Ewings. Where y’all been? Only in television limbo, it turns out, because everything that ever was on TV eventually is reborn. (Out of desperation, apparently. What else explains the soon-to-return Munsters?) Dallas is back as a “new” series tonight at 8 p.m., with a two-hour premiere on cable’s…
This week, the first-ever Oak Cliff Film Festival kicks off in and around the Bishop Arts District. According to Texas Theatre/OCFF co-founder Barak Epstein, the fest is intended to be “a new hyper-local film festival that would all take place in one bikeable area.” So bikeable, in fact, that Saturday…
