When Brandon Oldenburg, co-founder of Deep Ellum-based Reel FX studios, and author and illustrator William Joyce opened their new Moonbot Studios, they knew they needed to launch the creative company with a short film. It would be a calling card, a way of illustrating just what the business partners and friends wanted to do with their new company. And they knew to get the attention they wanted, their short would have to be good enough to win an Oscar.

Sound presumptuous? ..read more

Which of these weekend’s movies are worth your time. Check out our movies section to find out.

I’ve never given much thought to the domestic life of a corrupt cop before. He spends his days unnecessarily roughing up punks or shaking down local business owners, but at night he might return to a warm, beautiful home and be most concerned that he’s losing his connection to his young daughters. Can a person be a nasty human being and a good father?

Los Angeles Police Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) likes to think so. Actually, strike that: the question ..read more

Both in visual style and locale, Thin Ice sets itself somewhere in between the worlds of Fargo (1996) and Cedar Rapids (2011), a snowed-over Midwestern America that is populated by corny white men, at home in the banal, post-auto landscape. They walk in brown leather shoes across frozen parking lots outside of chain hotels, drop twenty dollar bills on worn out berber carpet, and shuffle papers in and out briefcases to make a living. There was a time when the puny ..read more

It’s been 12 years since McG (Charlie’s Angels, We Are Marshall) switched from directing four-minute music videos to two-hour feature films. It wouldn’t be a stretch, though, to say he never made the transition.

McG’s latest film, This Means War, is a flashy, colorful two-hour romp, one that could easily be deduced to a four-minute spot on whatever channel still plays music videos.

Here’s the gist. Hot woman can’t find love, so her friend signs her up for online dating. Two best ..read more

Animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi has worked with Hayao Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away) since the great Japanese filmmaker’s Princess Mononoke, and it takes only a glance at Yoneayashi’s first directorial project, The Secret World of Arrietty, to see the continuity of Studio Ghibli’s appealing and unmistakable visual style.

Arrietty (Bridgit Mendler) is a spirited 14-year old girl who lives with her father and mother in the floorboards of a house outsideTokyo. They are “borrowers,” and for generations, their kind have lived ..read more

Israel Luna’s IMDB biography says that the first film he ever saw was The Exorcist, at age five. Poor guy. I don’t think he’s recovered. The former Dallas-residing writer/director’s latest movie – the follow-up to the fantastically titled Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives – is The Ouija Experiment, a low-budget, hack-snore, that takes a half-ass swipe at the Paranormal Activity formula and delivers a nearly unwatchable, dull, and senseless succession of jump-out scares drowning in YouTube banality.

Set in a depressingly under-furnished ..read more

Don Hertzfeldt is one of those rare artists that, from the moment he put pen to paper, seemed to have fully realized a mature voice and visual style. His very first movie, a short he made for a freshman year college film class, is remarkable not only because it won the HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize for “World’s Funniest Cartoon” in 1998, but because it already embodies Hertzfeldt’s characteristic wry, sick sense of humor and his keen insight into ..read more

We’re two months out from the Dallas International Film Festival, which kicks off on April 12, and today, the Dallas Film Society sends word of the first 15 films that have been selected for the fest, as well as the recipient of the annual Texas Avery Animation Award. That award will go to Glen Keane, who may be responsible for many of the repeating faces in all those Disney hits in the 1990s – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and ..read more

There is a homer favorite in this year’s Oscar animated shorts competition, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” which was co-directed by Brandon Oldenburg, the co-founder of Deep Ellum-based Reel FX Creative Studios.

The movie is an elegy to life and books, beginning in a down-and-out New Orleans that is blown away by a hurricane. Morris Lessmore finds himself in the ruins, holding books whose words have been blown straight off the pages. In a magic twist, he is ..read more

Two Irish films are among the best of this year’s short list of five Oscar nominated live action short films, and both show a particular affinity for the natural wit and lyric sense of place that can be said to characterize that country’s rich storytelling heritage.

Peter McDonald’s “Pentecost” (pictured at top) is a pointed rip very much in the spirit of the current discontent with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church inIreland. Set in 1977 (a time when the church ..read more

Should you see The Vow on Valentine’s Day? Can Denzel give a spy thriller an extra twist? And forget The Rock, what’s Michael Caine doing in Journey 2? We have reviews of this week’s new releases in our movies section.

Denzel Washington’s star power is heavily taxed in Safe House, since he’s forced to generate enough screen magnetism to keep the audience interested even during those moments when he’s off-screen and we’re left alone with Ryan Reynolds, the least charismatic leading man working in the movies today.

It’s the damnedest thing, though: Washington pulls it off. Director Daniel Espinosa’s tale of double-crossing spies is conventionally plotted, and action-heavy without any bravura action sequences, and yet I enjoyed the trip.

Playing Tobin Frost, ..read more

That Brendan Fraser isn’t starring in the sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, is the result of some odd, high-ground Hollywood grandstanding – meh actors standing up for meh directors. The original Journey director, Eric Brevig, was too busy putting the finishing touches on another clonker, Yogi Bear, to devote himself to Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Unwilling to move on without the franchise originator, Fraser backed out of the film (gasp!), forcing studio execs, unwilling ..read more

The Vow is The Notebook meets Shattered, a story about a woman who loses her memory of her relationship with her husband after a car accident. It is a movie intended – by producers, casting directors, and marketers – to be this year’s go-to Valentine’s Day date movie, a brush off, feel good trifle that girls will drag their guys to out of deference to the ingrained rituals of the Hallmark holiday. Still it is hard to shake the feeling ..read more

Here’s a simple question: Have you seen the Oscar shortlisted documentary Battle for Brooklyn yet? Unless you traveled at some point last year to a film festival or caught the movie at one of its screenings in New York or on the West Coast, the answer is no. That’s because the movie is only making its Texas debut this Friday as the opening night film of the Thin Line Film Festival.

In its fifth year, the Denton-based film fest is the ..read more

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a short film in 1975 called Two Solutions for One Problem, about a schoolroom scuffle between two young boys. Through matter-the-fact narration, the filmmaker walks us through two possible resolutions of a relatively simple conflict: a boy borrows another boy’s book, but when he returns it, a page is ripped. In one scenario, the second boy responds to receiving his torn book by ruining one of the other boy’s possessions. This kicks off a cycle ..read more

German director Wim Wender’s new movie, Pina, isn’t so much a documentary about the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausche, as it is an attempt to reconcile two artistic languages – film and dance – in a way that allows each to show us something new about the other. To this end, Wenders employs 3D, the first to use it in a major documentary project since his New German Cinema cohort, Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). The technology is ..read more

Two young clerks sit the front desk of a old Connecticutinn on its last weekend of operation in Ti West’s latest spook-fare, The Innkeepers. Luke is a sputter-lipped, Dwight Schrute-come-Elvis Costello whose curiosity about the inn’s supposed haunting by a newlywed who was killed there decades ago has turned the pair into amateur ghost-hounds. Claire (Sara Paxton) is a jittery asthmatic: pretty, young, blond, and innocent. When one of the hotel’s only guests turns out to be one of her ..read more

Here’s why most “haunted houses,” the kind that spring up in amusement parks around Halloween, anger me: They don’t frighten their customers. They merely startle them.

You know how it goes. You paid your five or 10 bucks to get in, and then you spend five or 10 minutes walking through a series of dark hallways wherein every so often some teenager lurking unseen in a “ghostly” getup will jump out at you unexpectedly. You’re momentarily taken aback, and then maybe ..read more

Chronicle really wants to take a page from Peter Parker’s playbook— and then rip the whole damn thing to shreds. With great power comes great responsibility, indeed. The same could be said for young filmmakers with a decently cool (but definitely done) idea and a decently big budget (a reported $14-15 million) for one of these “found footage” films. For comparison purposes, the first Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000. Cloverfield, perhaps closer to Chronicle in intent, cost $25 million ..read more

German director Wim Wenders’ new documentary film, Pina, began as a collaborative project between the filmmaker and the dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch. But only days before beginning the shoot, Bausch unexpectedly passed away. It took months for Wenders to return to the project, after the urging of Bausch’s dancers at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. What the dancers and the director eventually created, is more than a documentary about the Pina’s unmistakable choreography; it is a study of art in mourning, and the ..read more

Actress Glenn Close’s relationship with the material of her new film, Albert Nobbs (directed by Rodrigo Garcia), goes back to 1982, when Close played the title character in a stage production. The idea for a film appeared a few years later, and the movie’s production is the product of more than 15 years of labor. It takes only a few moments with the film, in which the meticulously rendered Nobbs is the center piece, to understand how an actor could ..read more

Sporting the most matter-of-fact title since Snakes on a Plane, the new thriller Man on a Ledge delivers exactly what it promises. That is, admittedly, a low bar to clear.

The man in question climbs onto that ledge, of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, within the film’s first few minutes. His reasons for doing so are revealed in a series of flashbacks in which we learn that he’s an former cop named Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) who was sent to prison ..read more

The Grey is a rough and gruff, humorless war of attrition that reeks of the kind of Old Spice farcical manliness so delightfully spoofed by Corey Stoll’s Hemingway in last year’s Midnight in Paris. It is the kind of film that supposes the best way to learn about death is by looking it straight in the eye. It is a buddy movie, an action movie, and a horror movie, yet lacking the affection, thrills, or spooks that fuel each genre. ..read more