Author J.K. Rowling’s rags-to-riches biography is arguably better known than her most famous creation, Harry Potter. As the oft-repeated origin story goes, Rowling was a single mother making ends meet, aided by government assistance while she was scribbling the first installment of her phenomenally successful fantasy series in a café…
After David Vobora arrived back home in Dallas after a week in the Bermuda Triangle, he consumed 13,000 calories in 24 hours. He had just spent a week filming for a man versus water-type reality show called The Raft for National Geographic. The concept is essentially where he and one…
There aren’t many people worth traveling more than 1,000 miles for. Maybe the president of the United States, maybe your child you’ve never met, or maybe a resurrected John Lennon. But a former Bachelor contestant?…
The first ever WhoFest kicked off last year at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Addison on the same weekend as the BBC’s official American premiere of the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor. The episode brought back every single incarnation of the Doctor and turned a flooded conference…
If you’re a huge movie fan, you’ve got at least one filmmaker in mind that you would just love to sit down with just for a few minutes and root around their brain like someone looking for a contact lens in a Hardee’s dumpster. Well, the odds are pretty good…
UnfriendedOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the way…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time intensely, but because, having the privilege of watching their faces change…
It’s nearly impossible to persuade the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catch-all for “really expensive clothes,” as it’s commonly misunderstood, but a specific term for clothes made entirely by hand, for a specific…
Did you know that there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration. In the summer of 1945, the kid stands on a California dock, points his fingers magician-style out at the Pacific horizon, and screams a…
They say when one door closes, another one opens. Well, in the case of big D film festivals, when one ends its yearly run, another begins. Starting on Wednesday at The Angelika in Dallas, the USA Film Festival will open for its 2015 showcase of Texas and American independent films…
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
If you’ve ever played music, or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
When Hannah Kirby finished “Gimme Shelter” in The Voice’s battle round, her fate was in the hands of her coach, Blake Shelton. If you’ve never seen The Voice, it’s a singing competition show that strives to cut out the looks and glamour of being a musician and get to the…
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run Tuesday night. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect for…
Whenever a group of comedic movie mockers stage a live commentary for a bad movie screening, the movies are secondary. David Schmader, a writer who has performed live movie commentaries in 2002, wants you to see the movies. Wait, scratch that, just this one movie. He’s done over 50 commentaries…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly…
Iconic Mavericks power forward, Dirk Nowitski, is no longer just a star of the basketball court. Now, he’s a star of the big screen as well. The documentary, Nowitski. The Perfect Shot, already premiered to both critical and financial success in Germany last year. At this year’s Dallas International Film…
A curiosity: The actor Dick Miller, a rumpled salt, has brightened up countless B-movies by showing up for a scene or two to reel off some exposition or maybe get gutted by a robot. Yet his own movie, the one about his years of B-brightening, the one inviting us to…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’ most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there are two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience who made American Sniper a megahit, his…
