Posts Tagged ‘film reviews’
Iceman: Shannon Fodder
A glowering lead actor stands tall in this grim mob drama.KRISTIAN LIN
Seems that the world has discovered Michael Shannon. And, really, why not? Quite apart from his considerable skills, the 38-year-old Kentucky native offers up a unique screen presence, with his towering physique, flat bass voic...
Gatsby: Green Light
A great novel becomes a party soaked in champagne, hip-hop, and Art Deco.KRISTIAN LIN
A scant year after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published, it was made into a film. Since then, it has been turned into stage plays, other films, an opera, a graphic novel, and even video games. Baz Luhrma...
Indie Film Roundup
Are these three low-budget movies with stars worth traveling to see?KRISTIAN LIN
If you’re in Fort Worth, you’ll have to cover some territory to see the movies we’re discussing this week. That’s because their theatrical engagements are in Grapevine, Arlington, and Southlake. (Though one of them is a...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: This Must Be the Place (NR) Sean Penn stars in this dramedy by Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) about a retired rock star who returns to his native America to track down the Nazi officer who humiliated his late father decade...
Cloud Atlas: Only Connect
Six stories, three directors, and a hell of a lot of other stuff is in here.KRISTIAN LIN
Call a novel “unfilmable,” and you’re only waving a red flag in the face of certain filmmakers. David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas has been called that for good reason — it’s an exercise in literary derring-do, cont...
Sinister: Hum-Bughuul
Though not a bad fright, this new horror-thriller has lots of holes.STEVE STEWARD
If cinema has taught us anything, it’s that whenever a writer moves to a new town/house/hotel, he or she is inevitably going to scare up something terrifying, start to go crazy, and possibly attempt to turn the spouse into cu...
Films on the Fly
TCU grad Jennifer Brown-Thomas does everything, learning as she goes.KRISTIAN LIN
Half a dozen things make demands on Jennifer Brown-Thomas’ time these days, but she looks remarkably put together as she arrives for an interview — even her jeans seem ripped in an artful way. The 26-year-old Fort Worth nat...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Paperboy (R) Lee Daniels (Precious) adapts Pete Dexter’s novel about an investigative reporter (Matthew McConaughey) returning to his Florida hometown to find the truth about a decades-old murder. Also with Nicol...
Argo, Psychopaths: Let’s Fake a Movie!
Would-be filmmakers are the driving characters in these thrillers.KRISTIAN LIN
By coincidence, the titles of both movies this week refer to movies within the movies. Neither Argo nor Seven Psychopaths is really about the filmmaking process — the first throws up a nonexistent movie as a smokescreen for a...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: Butter (R) Jennifer Garner stars in this political satire as an Iowa woman who expects to finally win her local butter-sculpting competition, only to see her supremacy challenged by a little girl (Yara Shahidi) with pr...