Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing…
Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…
“I’ve been trained for this.” Those words — or some variation — come up several times throughout James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and they serve as one key to this strange, sprawling, majestic film. In adapting the 2009 nonfiction book about the search for a fabled city in…
HBO’s acid-bathed Beltway satire Veep didn’t exactly predict our absurd political reality. But it did come close enough that revisiting past seasons is like watching footage of a train wreck run backwards in slow motion. The episode called “C**tgate” brought a vaginal euphemism into a presidential election. “Election Night” saw…
There’s no excuse for skipping this year’s Thin Line Fest in Denton. The festival, which celebrates film, music and photography, takes place from Wednesday to Sunday during the post-Easter traffic lull. The weather will be crisp and clear after a weekend of wind and rain. Oh, and here’s the most…
First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…
Set immediately after World War I, Frantz, the latest by the prolific François Ozon, is structured by, and titled after , an absence: a young German soldier killed in battle. Other deficiencies, not intended, soon become apparent in this Lost Generation tale of love, grief and lies, which Ozon liberally…
Holy motors! How will they top this one? This is perhaps the fastest and, if not, certainly the most furious of the Fast & Furious movies. The beauty of the Fast & Furious movies is that no car stunt is ever too nonsensical.
Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…
The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
In his latest movie, How to Be a Latin Lover, Eugenio Derbez stars as a man who’s learning the hard way that as he ages, he’s no longer able to get by on charm alone. Derbez, who also produced the movie, clearly wasn’t picked for the lead role because of…
A lot has changed in the two years since the last Dallas Medianale. In March 2015, the new experimental media arts festival closed two months of screenings, exhibitions and performances at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC), promising to return biennially. Dallas Medianale is preparing to keep that promise later this…
“You can’t describe music with words,” the great Sonny Rollins observes in John Scheinfeld’s survey-course-brisk docu-dip into the art and life of John Coltrane. As if seeking to prove Rollins right, Scheinfeld’s interviewees hold themselves to generalities: “His sound is stunning,” observes appreciator-in-chief Bill Clinton, who adds, unilluminatingly, that it…
No matter your opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person, you can’t deny this: The man is a doer. And in Elliott Lester’s grief drama Aftermath, the ripped Renaissance man does a subtle, absorbing performance of despair so unlike his other work that his lined and laden face at times…
Somebody at Warners must’ve seen Going in Style, the 1979 film about old men robbing a bank, and decided that a happier, peppier version could be profitable. The original has no less than George Burns, Jackie Gleason sidekick Art Carney and method-acting legend Lee Strasberg as old fogies who decide…
It’s a good thing Jonathan Banks has such an interesting face. At the beginning of the third season of Better Call Saul, we spend a lot of quiet time with Banks’ surly, crooked-nosed cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut of Breaking Bad fame, watching as he dismantles his own car and works out…
In Netflix’s new teen-suicide drama series 13 Reasons Why, pretty-boy Marcus (Steven Silver) tells good-guy Clay (Dylan Minnette) that whatever the kids did to Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) to make her kill herself was no different than what happens to any other girl in any other high school everywhere. And…
Whether you’ve been movie hopping for a week or plan to catch your first eyeful of DIFF this weekend, you’ll get a fresh crop of films filling the screens plus a chance for a few encores. Voting is currently underway for all of this year’s plucky competition categories, and the…
Catch up on prior seasons of Vanderpump Rules on Hulu. Part one of the season five reunion airs Monday, April 3 on Bravo. Detractors of reality TV pooh-pooh the genre as a vacuous cesspool that celebrates crass idiocy and normalizes bad behavior that leads to societal horrors like our current…
If civilization were to end tomorrow — and who the hell knows, it just might — we could learn a lot about building the next one from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. Back in 1998, the Japanese director had his U.S. breakthrough with the wildly acclaimed After Life. Since then,…
Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first day of shooting for the horror film What Ever…
