It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…
I was twelve-years-old when Empire Records released. Depending how old you are, that might make me much older than you but that would also means I’m much wiser and better looking so I’m OK with it. When Empire Records hit theaters 20 years ago, it changed a lot for the…
Despite the film’s title, the minds behind This isn’t Funny, are expecting big laughs when they debuts their latest film at the Dallas International Film Festival. Pierce Cravens, a 29-year-old Dallas native, has been busy performing on Broadway, making appearances on television and recently produced This isn’t Funny, his first…
Chances are you don’t know who Cameron Nelson is and that’s ok, we can still be friends. Here’s your Reader’s Digest on the Dallas filmmaker: Nelson has been dabbling in the indie film world around these parts for a while now. He’s produced, written and directed a handful of short…
Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The good news a new reality show centering on the ladies of Dallas was recently picked up. Its working title is Ladies of Dallas because duh. The bad news is Bravo will show it. Bravo brought you all of…
The Dallas International Film Festival is back for 2015 and this year’s slate seems to be the biggest one yet. Although I can name more than five films that I want to see at this year’s DIFF, there are definitely a few that stand out among the many selections. It…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
In 1848 Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she’d made a mistake:…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the ’60s. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
Some years ago, I went to see Tom Jones perform. He sang all the hits, but I was unnerved by his new, walnut-brown goatee. It looked freshly trimmed and fake, like he’d ripped it off Evil Spock backstage. Superstars aren’t allowed to change. Even the fans who love them insist…
Get Hard, Etan Cohen’s comedy about a white stockbroker who hires a black man to prepare him for a 10-year stretch in San Quentin, is like a spoon that’s almost-but-not-yet sharpened into a shiv. With just a little more effort, it could kill. Judging by the poster, in which star…
Noah Baumbach has always had a dash of hypochondria, but in the last few years, his doctor’s visits have changed. “If you’re a worrier like I am, or Ben,” he says, referring to Ben Stiller, the star of his 2010 movie Greenberg, “you’re used to going, ‘Is this something that…
Doing everything right in one generation just makes you old-fashioned, even obsolete, in the next. That’s the harsh reality that confronts 40-year-old Liza — played with spirited, sarcastic élan by Tony-winning actress Sutton Foster — when she attempts to re-enter the workforce after a decade and a half of stay-at-home…
Hey there, horrible human being. We see you, scrolling and judging and probably eating over your keyboard, leaving impossible to reach crumbs forever wedged beneath the J key. Don’t try to hide your awfulness because we see you and it’s only fair that America sees you too…
We’re two films in to the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very…
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths — you can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
A new aspect of the 20th season of Dancing With The Stars is the viewers at home can watch a livestream of each of the couples practicing throughout the day. Congratulations, you have enough time to waste to watch an actual dance rehearsal that isn’t your 4-year-old daughter! Personally, I…
There are some simple reality TV truths. All country artists will choose Blake Shelton as their coach on The Voice, the dads on Teen Mom will hate their lives, and Derek Hough will win every season of Dancing With The Stars until the day he dies…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating, and generally making life…
