Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
The all-star film version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County opens here January 10 (postponed from December 25, which means we have to suffer our own horrible relatives all Christmas day instead of escaping to spend time with Letts’ fictional ones). Meryl Streep tops the cast list…
The calendar’s date is usually arbitrary when retro movie screenings are concerned. But in the case of Camp Crystal Lake, Friday the 13th is the only day that really matters. The Alamo Drafthouse keeps an eye on such things and it saw today as an opportunity for a sort-of film…
In 2013, love came in many forms: girl on zombie, boy on smartphone, and James Franco on — count ’em — two hot bikini babes at the same damn time. Sure, romantic comedies are as extinct as Oprah Winfrey’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, but…
Bronx-born filmmaker Abel Ferrara considers all of his fiction films to be documentaries: What you see is what happened in the moment that was shot. That mentality informed the making of Ms. 45, Ferrara’s characteristically complex 1981 rape-revenge drama. In the film, a mute teenager (Zoë Lund) copes with being…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarves. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
Some movies come barreling out of their caves like armies on the sociocultural warpath, self-consciously defining themselves as psychographic events, marking The Way Things Are Now and becoming part of history in the process. Given the ambition, we should embrace these rare explosions when they happen, even more so now…
Christmas is coming up and if you’re having trouble buying a gift for that hardcore movie buff in your life and you have a few thousand dollars just taking up real estate in your couch cushions, Heritage Auctions of Dallas may have a solution. The local auction house is getting…
We recently treated you to the news that seven different theaters in the Dallas area screen Die Hard in December. And you, dear reader, grew excited, because nothing quite says “Happy Holidays” like John McClain scribbling “Now I have a machine gun. HO HO HO” on a terrorist’s corpse. That…
Imports, muscle cars and general machines of inspiration will rev their engines in non-silent salute to Paul Walker tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson. The event was organized to honor the film star who passed away on Saturday, November 30 at age 40. Walker did more with his career…
The Alamo Drafthouse has been in the Dallas/Fort Worth area only a short time, but it has wasted no time bringing actors to the theater so devoted movie buffs can watch their most memorable movies with them. People like Paris Themmen and Julie Dawn Cole who played Mike Teevee and…
2013 was a good year to be bad. This year’s best villains weren’t just goons with guns — although there were a few great examples of those. (Here’s looking at you, Sean Penn.) We also hissed at slave-owners, inventors, seducers, producers, and a couple amazing women who left an impression…
The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he’s a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, he hasn’t been able to readjust to…
Fifteen years ago (December 4, 1998) an unusual movie was released, and roundly rejected: director Gus Van Sant’s off-puttingly faithful remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Fresh off the critical and commercial success of Good Will Hunting, Van Sant could’ve tried for another feel-good hit or a high-profile for-hire gig. Instead,…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
The great sins of the 20th century are already too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from mothers deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (opening November 27) hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside…
Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are fifteen docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…
Whether delivering a tree house harangue as Dictator-for-Life of G.R.O.S.S. or getting sneak-jumped by his tiger sidekick, Calvin was our kid id. Operating on a combination of misunderstood genius and pranky mischief, he and Hobbes conquered the world, time travel, art, dumb girls and physics — one perfectly drawn frame…
We’ve admired actress Allison Tolman since she debuted on a Dallas stage in 2004 in the comedy Anton in Show Business with Second Thought Theatre, the company she co-founded with other Baylor drama grads. Season after season, at STT and in shows at Kitchen Dog Theater and elsewhere, she kept…
It had to happen: There’s so much voiceover narration in today’s movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,…
In 1997, 87-year-old Richard Lusk flew from California to Florida to claim an $11 million prize he believed he’d won in a sweepstakes. The day after he returned home empty-handed, he had a stroke. Four months later, he bought a second plane ticket to Florida and stubbornly knocked on their…
