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

It has been more than a year since the Texas Theatre reopened on Jefferson Blvd. in Oak Cliff, and since the opening, the theater’s programming has leaned in the direction of something D Magazine music writer Christopher Mosley has called “genre purist.” By this, I believe Mosley means that the Texas Theatre’s programmers favor films in which thematic richness is subordinate to texture, tonal boldness, definition of milieu, and clarity of niche. Preferred are movies that confound more traditional aesthetic ..read more

Steven Soderbergh’s highly polished, throw-back spy thriller, Haywire, is an attempt at pure genre filmmaking. Utilitarian characterization, a singularly focused plot, and a deadpan heroin, Mallory (Gina Carano), the movie is not encumbered by knowingness, unhindered by rough textures or subtext. You might say it is a film about surface, but it is really a film that is surface. Soderbergh’s fingerprints are everywhere: schizophrenic media, style with sheen, rich, neon-primal colors that smack of early video refined, bright blues, yellows, ..read more

Ed. note: Coriolanus was originally slated to open in Dallas on Jan 20, but the opening has been pushed back to February. We will update this post when the opening date is set for our area. 

We are told by a screen title that Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, an adaption of Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus, takes place in a region “calling itself Rome.” And while the names, places, and references of the movie stay true to the bard’s historic setting, Fiennes has ..read more

The central character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, now adapted to the screen by Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours), is named Oskar. It is hard to shake the name’s reference to another child of literature, The Tin Drum’s Oskar Matzerath. Like The Tin Drum, which German writer Günter Grass penned in the heady days following World War II, when he left his bombed-out native land to hitchhike around France, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ..read more

Producer George Lucas has spent more than 20 years hoping to make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American U.S. military pilots. Leave it to the creator of Star Wars to turn the true story of that famed squadron’s World War II heroics into a larger-than-life myth.

Red Tails plays, as Lucas himself has noted in interviews leading up its release, like some pseudo-propagandist, let’s-all-rally-around-our-boys-in-uniform picture made in 1942. War is not hell on these battlefields; war is a ..read more

Where Soldiers Come From is a documentary that follows a group of friends from Upper Peninsula Michigan who join the National Guard. The movie finds ample opportunity to address similar disillusionment with the state of contemporary American politics and the debt of human suffering ideological policies levy on the average American citizen. But the beautifully shot, melodic documentary is not a political advocacy piece. Rather, it carefully and artfully captures the impact of deployment on the lives of soldiers, their families, friends, and towns. If it were shown alongside 2010′s Restrepo, the two movies could comprise a non-fiction version of The Deer Hunter.

Anime fans will welcome the chance to catch a limited engagement screening of Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: The Sacred Star of Milos at the Texas Theater beginning this Friday. Spun-off from the wildly popular Fullmetal Alchimist anime and manga series, the title character and his brother-cohort are off to Table City in the movie where they confront an unfolding saga of social warfare and oppression. The Milos people, enslaved for centuries, try futilely to revolt against their overlords, but beneath ..read more

Roman Polanski’s films are nearly always defined by confined, hostile environments: the boat in A Knife in the Water, the remote island mansion in The Ghost Writer, a corrupt, noir Los Angeles in Chinatown. In Polanski’s latest movie, Carnage, the action is restricted to a single Brooklyn apartment, an innocuous setting that becomes something of a narrative prison. The irony here is that the film’s New York location serves as a reminder that Polanski himself is a man confined – ..read more

It’s clear that Angelina Jolie doesn’t rank among America’s finest film directors. Which isn’t to say that her In the Land of Blood and Honey is a bad movie. It’s just an unremarkable and often gratingly manipulative one.

Scene after scene employs slow motion, or an amped-up score, or both, to do the heavy lifting of signaling to the audience that this is a moment during which you should feel something.

Jolie wants us to feel the horror that was the civil ..read more

Sometime in the past 10 years, Mark Wahlberg went from Mark Wahlberg, human, to Mark Wahlberg, Character. It was an imperceptible switch at the time, but one that now makes me think that whenever I’m watching a Wahlberg film I’m actually just watching a documentary crew capture his day-to-day fights, set-ups, and cons.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I heard that he was wanted for jewel smuggling, because that’s who Mark Wahlberg, human, has become: Mark Wahlberg, Character. I ..read more

A nuclear blast? A foreign attack? An alien invasion? Just what sets off the debasing, cruel, absurd drama of Xavier Gens’ The Divide is not important. All that matters is that the movie’s scenario is set in motion: a rag-tag group of men with a couple of women are stranded in the basement of a New York apartment building, and it isn’t long before they are all behaving badly.

While the French director does manage to string together an energetic and ..read more

In a galaxy far, far away, deep in a black hole, there exists a version of Joyful Noise that views like the absurdist comedy it should be, not the pandering, “Aw, shucks” monstrosity that will take over theaters Friday.

In that version (shot ideally by John Waters), a scene where Dolly Parton dances with the ghost of Kris Kristofferson will not draw groans from the audience, but rather applause for its tongue-in-cheek take on mortality. This same version will draw rave ..read more