As its subtitle suggests, one reason Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor, the decidedly less available Donald Rumsfeld. “I don’t do quagmires,”…
Let’s start with the ending, the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of…
Why can’t women stay friends? That’s a trick question, of course, but also one that British actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells lifelong pals in real life attempt to answer earnestly and honestly in their new HBO cringe comedy Doll & Em. In the sixepisode series, Mortimer and…
“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day. “I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers, murderers swearingtheir innocence, a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped that…
“I think the basic [cowboy] tradition is manliness, bravery, perseverance. You’ve got decades and decades of imagery that say that’s who it is. ” The opening lines of the film Queens & Cowboys are given by Western historian Michael Johnson. A few shots later, you meet Wade Earp, a 45-year-old…
Monday night Conan O’Brien played with guns; Tuesday night Conan put on lipstick. Clearly the man is taking a sincere interest in Dallas. He’s really doing some research. Last night he joked that during a visit to a strip club he met all of the Dallas Cowboys. I have quite…
Let me give you five excuses for why you didn’t watch Conan last night: You didn’t care. Your toddler finally let you get some sleep. You’re a bartender at one of the few local watering holes without a television. You hate funny gingers. Or maybe you didn’t know he’s filming…
We’ve told you plenty about Halt and Catch Fire. Now you can see it for yourself, at least 30 seconds of it, sliced up and laid under some sweet 80s dreams. It premieres June 1, and having seen the pilot I can assure you: It starts with a bang…
Wondering how the hell to navigate the more than 170 films gracing the screens of the Dallas International Film Festival? Well, how about some help from two DIFF-going veterans — Merritt Martin and Jennifer Medina — offering their best-intended, possibly challenging, but definitely enthusiastic assistance. Grab your hoodie (you’ll need…
The inspiration for Mark Goshorn Jones’ quirky comedy Tennessee Queer was anything but funny. The Shelby County Commission in Memphis wanted to pass an equal rights law in 2009 that protected LGBT city workers from job discrimination. They eventually did, but they were met with harsh and heated opposition for…
The Chicano labor leader César Chávez can now join Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of heroes whose world-altering achievements are dutifully recounted in timid, lifeless films any substitute can pop into the school DVD player when the regular history teacher is out. With César Chávez, Mexican director…
To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special-effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass Biblical epic. The ark built by Russell Crowe’s…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage, formerly Breacher, formerly Ten, his third attempt — after the full-auto western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in 14 months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…
Indie rock darling The National is the subject of a new film, Mistaken for Strangers, which opens this month at the Texas Theatre. It’s been called a mockumentary, but after seeing it, that’s the last description I’d use…
Her on-air personality is typically a hardcore mean trainer, who motivates The Biggest Loser contestants by most of the time yelling in their face…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, that would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations: You don’t see…
Here’s the rare current-affairs documentary that doesn’t just show us something gone wrong in some part of our world. Rachel Boynton’s first-rate Big Men instead peels the skin off the world itself, revealing the gears as they grind away, casting familiar doc scenarios in shades of illuminating gray: The heroes…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a 16-year-old girl. The film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage quatre…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European Republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and rise of a reich without so much as…
Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated 20-year, 20-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
