Film
Symphonic Shorts
The FWSO’s players get solos in some short films online.KRISTIAN LIN
“As far as I know, we’re the first ones,” said Paul Unger. The 43-year-old bassist for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra was referring to the series of short documentary films that he has made along with filmmaker Erik Cl...
Hit & Run: Dax a Lot
A Shepard leads his flock in this interesting, forgettable hybrid.KRISTIAN LIN
Dax Shepard became famous as one of Ashton Kutcher’s crew of pranksters on the now-defunct TV show Punk’d before settling into a career of playing loudmouthed jerks in middling-to-bad comedy films. (I haven’t seen him on ...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Awakening (R) This period horror flick begins promisingly before collapsing into a pile of nonsense. Rebecca Hall stars as a scientific debunker of supernatural hoaxes in 1921 England. When a schoolmaster (Dominic ...
ParaNorman’s Activity
This animated comedy for kids will scare you silly.KRISTIAN LIN
All right! This is how I like my animated kids’ movies — intelligent, funny, and scary enough to keep you up at night. ParaNorman comes to us from Laika Entertainment, the same stop-motion animation studio that brought us t...
Timothy Green: Autumn Leaves
A kid grows from a garden in this strange, uneven fable.KRISTIAN LIN
The word “odd” is entirely appropriate in the title of The Odd Life of Timothy Green. This family-oriented movie has the bad luck to come to us just one week after Ruby Sparks, another magic-realist fable about a person who...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Bourne Legacy (PG-13) Jeremy Renner stars as a new secret agent who comes out of the same CIA program as Jason Bourne. Also with Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach, Donna Murphy, Corey Stoll, Zel...
Ruby Sparks: Dreamgirl
A novelist writes a girlfriend for himself, and an actress writes a role for herself.KRISTIAN LIN
When you hear the plot of Ruby Sparks, you’ll think you’ve heard it before. You’ll be right, in a sense — the story’s roots go back to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. But you’ll be wrong, too, because this retell...
Fizzy Campaign
Will Ferrell and company stump for laughs in this election season.KRISTIAN LIN
When we last left Will Ferrell, he was starring in Casa de mi Padre, an intriguing though failed experiment in genre parody. His new comedy, The Campaign, is a better, funnier movie, and even if it doesn’t rank among Ferrell...
Rebooting Total Recall
I forget why they remade this sci-fi thriller.KRISTIAN LIN
On paper, remaking Total Recall is a better idea than restarting the Spider-Man series. The original film came out back in 1990, and while its special effects were cutting-edge at the time, technology has reached heights since ...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: Ruby Sparks (R) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) direct this comedy about a struggling novelist (Paul Dano) who magically conjures a girl (Zoe Kazan) to life after creating her as a character in...