Patrick Warburton is that rare voice actor who looks like he sounds. His imposing, muscular physique complements his deep basso voice, but his warm tone gives a touch of soul to his many memorable performances as lunkheaded alpha males. Quite likely your ears perk up when you hear him. He…
The queasiest thing about American Crime Story’s (FX) retelling of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial is how easily such a flagrant miscarriage of justice could happen all over again. The twin forces that most warped that case, after all, still plague us today: a tabloid culture that reduces flesh-and-blood…
Three years ago, Michael Moore wrapped up a TV interview about the Sandy Hook massacre and asked the producers to leave him alone. “You guys call me every time there’s a school shooting,” he sighed. He had, after all, made Bowling for Columbine, which blasted the NRA and the nightly…
Perhaps one of the most confusing American traditions is relying on a rodent to predict the end of winter. But that is precisely the holiday we are celebrating today. Groundhog Day arrives every February and like Phil Connors says in the namesake movie, “This is one time where television really…
The movie they’re selling isn’t the movie this is. Sony Pictures Classics is peddling Nicholas Hytner’s film of Alan Bennett’s play and memoir The Lady in the Van like it’s the usual twinkly Best Exotic time-with-our-elders holiday entertainment. There’s Maggie Smith, dressed up as what my grandmother used to call…
The Denton Black Film Festival happened over the weekend, despite having gone under many folks’ radar during its 2nd year in operation. With a robust programming schedule, the 3-day event was held in Downtown Denton and just three weeks before the 9th annual Thin Line Film Festival hits the downtown…
There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless…
Here’s an odd thing to say of a lavishly expensive 3D IMAX maritime disaster flick that hits theaters just a month after the last one: They don’t make them like this anymore. There’s a reason for that, of course — the parents and grandparents who like ’em stolid and corny…
“Every film is a documentary of its actors,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, Andrew Haigh’s shattering marital drama 45 Years expands that maxim: As we gaze at and listen to these performers, whose characters reflect on nearly a half-century together — almost as long as…
There’s essentially one joke in the Kung-Fu Panda movies. A ridiculous, adorable creature executes some extravagant action-flick flourish — vaulting over roofs, dropping a bad guy, striking a poster-perfect superhero pose. Then the battle music fades and that adorable creature breaks badass character to remind us it’s totally relatable, even…
“Who can give me the derivative of X?” a high-school teacher asks early in the YA-apocalypse mashup The 5th Wave. As soon as she asks that, the lights blink off, everybody’s cellphones die and jets tumble from the sky. We never hear a student respond, but here’s my Official Fan…
Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously left the White House with a warning to the American public about the rise of the military-industrial complex. When Barack Obama exits the Oval Office next year, he wouldn’t be remiss in cautioning the nation about the conspiracy-industrial complex, which has dug its tentacles into…
Remember when Thin Line was just a film festival? Well, the minds behind the festival stylishly exploded like the comet in Michael Bay’s Armageddon, adding bands galore, groovy art exhibits, panels, and other creative events. Last year our erstwhile staffer Daniel Rodrigue taught a free crash course photography lecture. If…
You can knock his prankish dilettantism all you want, but James Franco — that actor/director/writer/boho curio — has this going for him: The not-bad short stories of his books Palo Alto and A California Childhood have now been adapted into two quite good films. Like Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto (2013),…
An admirably complex tale of time travel, corporate espionage and high emotions you’ll just have to take everyone’s word on, Jacob Gentry’s science-fiction puzzler Synchronicity is so ambitious — and so canny, on occasion — that you might be willing to forgive its indie infelicities. The acting is iffy, especially…
But what about the meaninglessness of everything? William Monahan’s Mojave is one of those ’90s-style chatty-killer movies, mixed with one of those ’90s-style guns-in-the-desert existential cheapies, the kind of picture where good-looking dudes shooting each other is passed off as elemental and beautiful rather than just what it actually is…
Do you know Arthur Redcloud? He lives in Colleyville as a fuel delivery driver. Oh, another tidbit about him is he’s also in the biggest movie of the year, The Revenant, which just racked up 12 Oscar nominations for the upcoming Academy Awards. Yeah, you know Arthur Redcloud, and even…
Benghazi is a hashtag battle-cry, a call to arms that many Americans don’t understand. Unlike the simplicity of “Remember the Alamo!” a bleat of “Benghazi!” still has people wondering, “Wait, what happened? And why are we mad?” Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation, though…
Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top…
Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. To Americans of a certain generation, he’ll always be Hans Gruber from Die Hard; to those of a slightly fresher vintage, he’ll never not be Severus Snape. But it was his ability to transcend the typecasting of those iconic roles that…
MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles is gorgeous and lunkheaded, gory and hilarious, sometimes awful and sometimes full of awe. It’s also quite welcome: Just as Terry Brooks tore the pompousness out of Tolkien with his pulpy, brick-thick Shannara novels, the series – executive produced by Jon Favreau – shows your Game…
