In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a BART transit officer. The officer later claimed that he meant to reach for his Taser and…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that depiction implies. We can’t really envision an afterlife that isn’t somehow modeled on our own psychic landscape. So…
You can make the free movie rounds each weekend in July, thanks to Downtown Dallas Inc. and Alamo Drafthouse Richardson. DDI announced its newest community-building project yesterday, a migrating outdoor summer film series set to occupy four different downtown spaces over the next month. The Friday night collection has a…
It’s easy to sit at home and play along with a trivia game show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and believe you could breeze through the questions to the $1 million bounty. Actually trying out for a shot to be considered for a seat in that cushy, purple…
Twelve years ago the Asian Film Festival of Dallas was an informal gathering housed in donated spaces. Promotional materials consisted of black-and-white xerox hand-outs and raw enthusiasm. Since then it’s grown and matured into a destination festival with sponsorship by McDonald’s and Well Go USA, a distribution company specializing in…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
A bewitching helix of pure movie stuff, Peter Strickland’s seething and self-conscious whatsit Berberian Sound Studio may scan as a psychological thriller, but it’s really a lavish gift to film geeks in a lovely matryoshka box. We haven’t been here before: the Italian film industry circa 1976, in that post-dubbing-craze…
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv-comedians-turned-actors-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all of the characters in The Way, Way…
Texas Theatre is going to screen Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 35 mm this weekend (Friday, July 12 to Sunday, July 14), honoring the film’s quarter century anniversary. Now, if our math is right, that means it’s been 25 years since you experienced one of your childhood’s most confusing, conflicting…
The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they’re also about beautiful men, charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a long-legged…
Though the script includes bits and pieces of writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s real childhoods, The Way, Way Back is a slick debut that feels like a recycling of familiar coming-of-age materials. It even shares with The Descendants, for which Faxon and Rash won an adapted screenplay Oscar, the…
Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants, or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…
Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and since its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…
The audience for A Band Called Death, the new documentary by Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett opening tonight at Texas Theatre, is a self-selected batch. That’s because Death, a group that first cut its demo in Detroit back in 1974, went unknown until that same 45 resurfaced at a…
Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s all-exposition-and-explosions filmmaking, it’s also a mad liberal’s vision of…
If you’ve never seen Sandra Bullock blow a peanut shell out of her nose, and you’d like to, The Heat is your movie. That’s not meant sarcastically: It’s one of the highlights of this often dismal but occasionally inspired comedy from Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, which pits Bullock’s hoity-toity…
It’s the final installment of the Edgar Wright directed “Blood and Ice Cream” Trilogy, and won’t see wide release until August 23. But the new Alamo Richardson (now set to open on August 9) refuses to wait, so it’s announced an early screening of The World’s End inside the yet-to-be-opened…
The Asian Film Festival of Dallas will usher in its 12 year of programming with an expansion, moving from its old Magnolia digs to the extra spacious Angelika for 2013. Last year’s showcase pulled in huge titles like Ace Attorney, the latest release by Takashi Miike (Ishi the Killer, Audition),…
Things are moving along at the new Richardson branch of Alamo Drafthouse, the Austin-based chain known for simultaneously serving up booze, food and great movies. Construction is in such good shape that the venue says it will open a full week sooner than originally thought, with a new date set…
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams and pom-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…
Destruction is scary, but not half as scary as the act of rebuilding, the moment of looking at the random, jagged pieces you’ve got left and wondering how the hell you’re going to fit them together. In Marc Forster’s World War Z, the world as we know it is destroyed…
