One of this summer’s most anticipated movie events is the release of Sir. Ridley Scott’s latest film, Prometheus, an almost-prequel to Alien that hits theaters June 8. To celebrate the director, The Big Movie at the Magnolia will bring two of Scott’s films back to the big screen this week and next. The mini-retrospective begins with Legend, the cult- fantasy dripping with goblins, unicorns, and fairys and starring Tom Cruise and Tim Curry. We have three pairs of tickets to tonight’s ..read more

By the time the name of toy company Hasbro appeared onscreen during the opening credits, my expectations had reached their lowest point. It was a reminder that Battleship is based on a board game — a game that lacks even the sort of back-story or character development found in Candy Land or Monopoly.

“How are they going to make a movie out of that?” is the appropriate response of any reasonable observer. And yet they did. Fortunately, in the hands of ..read more

What to Expect When You’re Expecting begins with what I assumed was a spoof of the confoundingly popular TV show Dancing With the Stars. Cameron Diaz plays Jules Baxter, a fitness guru who is a contestant on the show and is herself the host of a televised weight-loss contest that looks like NBC’s The Biggest Loser.

But these two shows within the movie aren’t actually parodies. They’re more like straightforward re-creations. What to Expect isn’t made for audiences looking to laugh ..read more

Je-kyu Kang’s bloated, nationalistic World War II man-love melodrama feels like the child of Chariots of Fire and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse. There’s lots of Spielberg in My Way, in fact, down to the reshot Saving Private Ryan D-Day sequences that flip the perspective from the Allies to the Nazis. How we got there comprises the rest of My Way’s often hackneyed narrative, which tells the tale of two star runners, one Korean (Jun-shik Kim, Dong-gun Jang), and one Japanese (Tatsuo Hasegawa, Jo Odagiri), who end up ..read more

On Crooked Arrows’ website, the new movie about a ragtag lacrosse team made up of Native Americans is described as being “modeled upon the consistently successful underdog sports movie popularized by Mighty Ducks, Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, and Bend It Like Beckham.” You can take out the other three films; this is a blatant rip-off of The Mighty Ducks, one that does the original a disservice.

Part of the problem with Crooked Arrows is that its hackneyed, derivative plot is matched ..read more

As elegantly constructed, beautifully shot, and inspiring as Bess Kargman’s documentary First Position actually is, I have to admit I am growing weary of the competition doc genre. What movies like First Position offer – from Spellbound to A Surprise in Texas to Thank You For Judging – is a built in dramatic arc. We meet inspiring hopefuls who push through the drama of excruciating competition. The stakes are high, the tension is thick. And then, in the end – ..read more

With each successive Sacha Baron Cohen project, it feels as if the comedian’s best work may be behind him. If you had to pinpoint a moment that represented the best of what Cohen’s brand of humor can produce, look up the interviews he conducted as Ali G with Newt Gingrich or a number of NBA stars. Da Ali G Show offered a kind of high-minded candid camera masquerading as dimwitted contemporary broadcasting. Often brutal and unsympathetic to the interviewees, there ..read more

FrontRow and the Magnolia Theater’s The Big Movie series continues this Tuesday with the final film in the New York-inspired Uptown/Downtown series, West Side Story, one of the most beloved musicals of all time.

As usual, we have three pairs of tickets to giveaway for tonight’s screening, which will start at 7:30 p.m. To get your hands on them, you just have to answer this question in the form below: What are the names of the two rival gangs that ..read more

In lieu of a review, here’s a nifty flowchart that will help you decide whether you’re the type of person who will enjoy the film.

I’m tired of vampires. I haven’t even seen any of the Twilight films — neither having been professionally required to do so, nor a teenage girl — and yet I find myself suffering fatigue of the undead. I am calling for a moratorium on all new TV or film productions about blood-sucking creatures of the night.

Was the world crying out for a movie remake of a 1960s gothic soap opera featuring vampires, ghosts, witches, and werewolves? Star Johnny Depp and director ..read more

Taika Waititi’s Boy takes place in the remote New Zealand countryside in 1984. The setting offers something of a visual disconnect, a primordial coastal paradise populated with rotted-out, beaten-down bungalows inhabited by the poor, salty kiwis. This is the world in which the story’s main character, known by the endearing, if diminutive “Boy” (James Rolleston) grows up. It is a place where the local general store is run by the boy’s aunt; where his only guardian, his grandmother, leaves her ..read more

It was closing day at Texas Frightmare Weekend, soon after the Verne Troyer (“Mini Me”) panel and just before the vendors finished taking inventory, packing up their wares and rolling their goods out of the hotel on carts and dollies. A scrawny kid who looked to be in his early twenties rushed up to me, nearly out of breath, and exclaimed, “You’re the dude with the ‘Scooby Doo Massacre’ trailer!” I responded with a start, “Well yeah; but it’s ‘Saturday ..read more

The anticipation of the first blockbuster of the summer season, The Avengers, has hit near hysteria. It took in close to $200 million in just two days after being released overseas. It has filled up Twitter chatter for months. Now, when it finally hits theaters this Friday, riding a wave of pitch-perfect marketing and built-in fan fascination, there is only question left: is the new movie worth all the fuss?

In a word, absolutely. The Avengers is by far the best ..read more

Richard Linklater likes to listen to people talk. As early on as his breakthrough feature, Slacker, it’s been clear that he thinks everybody’s got a story worth telling, and that it’s worth stopping to listen to each of them, at least for a minute.

The Austin-based director saw a story worth telling in a 1998 article by Texas Monthly’s (and Dallas’ own) Skip Hollandsworth about a strange crime in the small East Texas town of Carthage and of the even stranger ..read more

An entertaining lark of a film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel features an all-star cast of some of America’s favorite aging British thespians in a pleasant, if unremarkable, story about people seeking a second life in old age rather than merely a place to shut themselves away to face their inevitable decline.

We’re introduced quickly to the group of retired Brits who each separately decide that being able to stretch the buying power of their pensions in the less expensive living ..read more

Zal Batmanglij’s first feature, Sound of My Voice, follows two twenty-something wannabe documentary filmmakers into a mysterious cult centered around the beautiful and enigmatic character of Maggie (Brit Marling), who claims to be a visitor from the future. Posing as cult members, Peter (Christopher Denham) and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) sneak cameras into the reserved basement confines of the group, but once they are in, they find themselves struggling to resist the odd charismatic power Maggie manages to wield ..read more

In the Norwegian thriller Headhunters, Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a corporate recruiter who doubles as an art thief, using his position to probe potential victims for key information – when they’re going to be out of the house, if they have a dog, what art they own. Brown runs up against a tough opponent, however, when he finds himself recruiting Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) for a top spot at Pathfinder. Clas has a Rubens worth “up to 100 million ..read more

The next block of films in The Big Movie series at the Magnolia Theater kicks off tonight. Uptown/downtown will bring three beloved, New York-centric films back to the big screen, beginning tonight at 7:30 p.m. with Woody Allen’s black-and-white love story to the Big Apple, Manhattan. Per usual, we have three pairs of tickets to giveaway, and each pair comes with some popcorn. So, to win them, just answer in the form below: who was the cinematographer robbed of an ..read more

The USA Film Festival finished up this weekend, on the heels of the Dallas International Film Festival. So it is only natural that we’d get some more film festival news. The new kid on the block, the Oak Cliff Film Festival, has announced some its screenings, events, and sponsors. Some highlights:

- A reunion screening of the Bonnie and Clyde-inspired, Dallas-shot cult classic, Love and a .45 , with cast and crew in attendance (including a possible Renee Zellweger appearance, I’m told). Apparently one 35 ..read more

The title character of Philippe Falardeau’s new film, Monsieur Lazhar, is an Algerian refugee who shows up at a school in Quebec and takes a difficult job as a teacher filling in for a young woman who hung herself in the classroom. We know little about the man, but there is enough to suspect that what he tells school administrators – that he was a long-time teacher in his native country – isn’t true. Maybe his wife was. Maybe he ..read more

If you find yourself watching The Five-Year Engagement (I know, I know, sometimes we’re dragged to these things, sometimes you just need a date movie, and sometimes things look better on paper then they actually are), come back to this post and answer this question for me: what has really changed at the end of the five years that makes marriage finally make sense for the movie’s two wandering protagonists, Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt)? All I can ..read more

Boaz Yakin gets this right in Safe, his new action-thriller staring Jason Statham: keep the bullets ahead of the beat. That sense of pacing – the tightly packed punches (a bullet to the head hear, a snapped-neck there) – keep Safe’s energy up, which proves a necessary task considering the rather conventional and lackluster heist-flick the movie wants to be. In Safe Statham plays Luke Wright, a mixed-martial arts fighter who throws fights for the mob. Oh wait, no. He’s ..read more

Why aren’t there more hockey movies? You would think that a sport that provides both nail-biting game tension and fist-swinging boxing drama would get more screen time. Goon, by Canadian director Michael Dowse, is a new comedy that tries to capitalize on both. Pulling a page from Slap Shot (1977), the movie centers around the endearing, if dimwitted Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott), a going nowhere bar bouncer who is spotted by a minor league hockey coach when he beats ..read more

Calling Swedish director Ola Simonsson’s first feature, Sound of Noise, a musical comedy isn’t exactly wrong, but it likely won’t conjure up the right connotations. The absurdist, layered satire is a wildly irreverent, often hilarious comedy about a team of terrorists musicians, undaunted in their efforts to perform an ambitious avant-garde composition, “Music for One City and Six Drummers.” The desire to play that almost-impossible piece sets in motion a series of madcap episodes as the musicians confiscate bulldozers, kidnap ..read more

Back in high school, I became increasingly familiar with Cliffs Notes, the tiny synopses of classic works of literature. I “read” Julius Caesar, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, and dozens of other books that impeded my otherwise busy schedule of soccer practice and sleeping.

Sitting through The Raven, I couldn’t help but think the screenwriters had spent their high school years the same way I had: learning enough plot points and character names to get by, but not ..read more