I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Not only are we, like we’re sure you are, genuinely excited about the return of Arrested Development on May 26, we also have absolutely no idea what will happen. The family, those blowhards, could be scattered around the globe, and indeed initial reports suggested that there wouldn’t be a massive…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a 12-year-old girl borne away toward rape and misery, or a penis doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. All three of those things happen…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
Thought all subcultures were already tapped for reality television? Guess again. A new program is gaining momentum and intends to fill its cast with our favorite obsessives, The Nerds of Earth. The Quest has been described by its creator as “Amazing Race in Middle-Earth” and takes its potential crew on…
Before they were strangers who decided to stop being polite and start getting real, the cast members of Real World were just stars in waiting. MTV’s iconic staple of reality television is now casting for Season 29. The show’s vetters will be in Dallas at Redrock Bar and Grill on…
A few weeks ago, Jason Reimer’s lovely teaser for the Oak Cliff Film Festival made the rounds. Today, we finally get some concrete evidence of just what will be screening. Some highlights include Computer Chess, Andrew Bujalski’s wonderfully weird ode to ’80s computer programmers; Joe Swanberg’s brewery comedy Drinking Buddies;…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
“It was 1991. I fly into L.A. I take a cab to Compton. On the phone, Richard [Williams] said, ‘The only thing I guarantee you, you won’t get shot,'” says tennis coach Rick Macci. “I thought he was kidding.” Macci was meeting with Williams and his two young daughters, Venus…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don’t tell the eighth graders about…
Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher are professional data sifters. You could also say they watch crap for a living. In fact, let’s say that instead. The pair harvests and compiles snippets from salvaged VHS tapes for their Found Footage Festival, then screens the stuff publicly. It results in analog peculiarity…
Over at film website Twitch, the first bumper for the second annual Oak Cliff Film Festival was released today. Texas Theatre’s Jason Reimer directed the nearly three-minute video, which features a time-traveling Confederate solider planting an OCFF flag by the Trinity River, which naturally leads into a paintball fight. (You…
Horror fans, this is your weekend to check out Texas Frightmare Weekend, which has been dubbed “the Southwest’s premier horror convention.” And with the kind of lineup they have this year, even non-horror fans might find something worth braving. Here are our picks for the panels and films you won’t…
Where has Robert Downey Jr. gone? There’s no doubt he’s the star of Iron Man 3; he sprints through the picture like a neurotic panther. And yet he’s absent, detached in a Zen-like way from the whole affair. The nakedness that defines his best performances — in any role, up…
Rampaging through the otherwise arid desert-scape of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone doesn’t want for ambition or walnuts — he may be the premier chronicler of Berlusconi-era Italian culture, and its most muscular satirist. (That is, when Italian society isn’t busy outpacing satire altogether.) His follow-up to 2008’s Gomorrah, Reality…
Stephanie Zacharek is the new chief film critic at the Village Voice. Alan Scherstuhl is the Voice’s film editor. Sometimes they gab about how the review-sausage gets made. To: Stephanie Zacharek From: Alan Scherstuhl Hi, Stephanie, welcome again to the Voice! Like you, I found myself worn out by Iron…
Every week, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming week or weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. Iron Man 3 Wide…
Last week, Manhunt, a new documentary, opened the 43rd annual USA Film Festival at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas. Like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, it chronicles the CIA’s search for Osama bin Laden. But where Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal condensed characters and dramatized history, Manhunt director Greg…
