The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep. She’s like an…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes…
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-Internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now. Here’s a clutch of horny high school dopes hanging out on Skype, getting doxed…
There’s not quite as much desert and dancing as you might expect in Desert Dancer, an earnest and occasionally hokey drama about kids wanting to hoof it in a world that forbids all hoofin’. Since it’s a based-on-a-true-story job, and since the killjoys this time are the Iranian government, much…
If you’ve ever played music, or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off: Are you playing toward some idea of perfection, perhaps in the…
When Hannah Kirby finished “Gimme Shelter” in The Voice’s battle round, her fate was in the hands of her coach, Blake Shelton. If you’ve never seen The Voice, it’s a singing competition show that strives to cut out the looks and glamour of being a musician and get to the…
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run Tuesday night. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect for…
Whenever a group of comedic movie mockers stage a live commentary for a bad movie screening, the movies are secondary. David Schmader, a writer who has performed live movie commentaries in 2002, wants you to see the movies. Wait, scratch that, just this one movie. He’s done over 50 commentaries…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly…
Iconic Mavericks power forward, Dirk Nowitski, is no longer just a star of the basketball court. Now, he’s a star of the big screen as well. The documentary, Nowitski. The Perfect Shot, already premiered to both critical and financial success in Germany last year. At this year’s Dallas International Film…
A curiosity: The actor Dick Miller, a rumpled salt, has brightened up countless B-movies by showing up for a scene or two to reel off some exposition or maybe get gutted by a robot. Yet his own movie, the one about his years of B-brightening, the one inviting us to…
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’ most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there are two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience who made American Sniper a megahit, his…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…
I was twelve-years-old when Empire Records released. Depending how old you are, that might make me much older than you but that would also means I’m much wiser and better looking so I’m OK with it. When Empire Records hit theaters 20 years ago, it changed a lot for the…
Despite the film’s title, the minds behind This isn’t Funny, are expecting big laughs when they debuts their latest film at the Dallas International Film Festival. Pierce Cravens, a 29-year-old Dallas native, has been busy performing on Broadway, making appearances on television and recently produced This isn’t Funny, his first…
Chances are you don’t know who Cameron Nelson is and that’s ok, we can still be friends. Here’s your Reader’s Digest on the Dallas filmmaker: Nelson has been dabbling in the indie film world around these parts for a while now. He’s produced, written and directed a handful of short…
Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The good news a new reality show centering on the ladies of Dallas was recently picked up. Its working title is Ladies of Dallas because duh. The bad news is Bravo will show it. Bravo brought you all of…
The Dallas International Film Festival is back for 2015 and this year’s slate seems to be the biggest one yet. Although I can name more than five films that I want to see at this year’s DIFF, there are definitely a few that stand out among the many selections. It…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions. He’s the…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled…
In 1848 Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she’d made a mistake:…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the ’60s. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
