1. Hollie Cavanagh’s puh-fect Idol dream ends: We were all thinking it. “She’s adorable, but how is our half-British McKinney flower still going strong on American Idol, when so many superior performers have been kicked to the curb before her?” But somehow, some way, our Hollie got by on a…
A significant portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap,…
Nobody took opera more seriously than Wagner, and no dork culture is more dedicated than hard-core Wagner fans. This is due largely to his famous Ring Cycle, a series of four operas seen as the most ambitious work any set of performers can execute. In the nerdiest of music circles,…
UPDATE 7/16: Turns out, The Dark Knight Rises will be showing in 15/70 format at the Cinemark 17. One caveat: the theater is a digital IMAX retrofit. Which means it’s big and badass, but the Omni theater in Fort Worth is a solid bet for seeing DKR in the optimum…
Being a huge Horror hound, not to mention Texas Frightmare Weekend veteran, my general advice would be to see and do everything! But obviously you only have limited time and one body (which hopefully stays unsevered throughout the three days) so allow me to help curate your TXFMW experience for…
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. But unlike most movies that fall under that label, it never indulges…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the basement of a San Fernando Valley split-level in the middle of the night to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A supposedly sickly yet ethereally…
The 81-year-old Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff may be known historically as the movie house that Howard Hughes built or the scene where police found Lee Harvey Oswald holed up on that fateful day in November, but for the past two years it’s been known as the place to go…
If you’re a gore geek like me or even just the general lover of the Horror genre, you’re going to want to clear your schedule because the Southwest’s premier Horror event, Texas Frightmare Weekend, is about to jumpstart its chainsaw and rip through the DFW Hyatt Regency. Every year, the…
It happens every Tuesday night at Texas Theatre: The cinematic garbage disposal gets all jammed up. Some brave soul then must plunge his fist in to find the source of the rattle — please don’t flip the switch during this delicate time. The slimy disturbance could be anything — a…
What’s that, lady? You want to cover yourself in fake blood and pose in a prom photo with Anthony Michael Hall? Yeah, get in line. This weekend is Frightmare, a three-day celebration of gore, grindhouse and general film havoc. Maybe you’ve heard of a certain 20th Century Fox project called…
Forty years ago this month, Peter Lord – along with his producing partner David Sproxton – didn’t realize the legacy they were beginning when they assembled clay figurines on a small kitchen table in Bristol, UK and proceeded to animate them. One. Painstaking. Movement. At. A. Time. Decades later, not…
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…
The devil must have been really busy in the early ’90s; there were a lot of trends and careers who’s successes could only be attributed to fiery soul relinquishment. Angel Martin in Shock ‘Em Dead, tonight’s Tuesday Night Trash movie at Texas Theatre, is no exception. Played by Stephen Quadros…
There’s an over-arching theme in the show Battlestar Galatica that is an apt metaphor for Hollywood: “It happened before and it will happen again.” The “it” in Battlestar is the whole Machines-Become-Sentient-and-Kill-Humans-thing. But the catchy, ominous phrase could be viewed as a metaphor for Hollywood’s persistent ability to repeat mind-numbingly…
You a big fan of the cinematic sweet spot that existed between 1985 and 1995? Like, say, B-grade, man-in-fishmonster-suit horror? How ’bout tiny buzz-saw robot slashers? Pesticide-tripping exterminators uncovering secret insect intrigue? Yeah? Well, your Jesus was at Texas Theatre Saturday — looking rangy and awesome, wearing smoky, round, actor-emeritus…
If you’re still hanging on to that DIFF laminate after a week of intensive film screenings, we are so proud of you. Also, maybe take a shower and call a family member, because you probably smell like buttery popcorn substitute and those closest to you are concerned about your absence…
Earlier this week I said Brooklyn Castle was probably the best film of the festival — well, I may have to amend that statement. While still topping the documentary charts, another horse has pulled ahead in the over-all category: the Korean blockbuster My Way. Selected as one of the festival’s…
Hoodie? Check. Popcorn? Check. Complete list of films to see today at DIFF, seasoned with links to background information and brief descriptions of content? Double check! We’ve got our DIFF picks for Thursday, so prepare your cinematic socks to be rocked…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from the visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to…
Back with his first film in 14 years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. It’s true both in respect to the singularity of his deadpan dialogic style, as well as to his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s follow-up to 1998’s The Last Days of…
