New ‘Superman’ flies low under a long shadow

Posted on July 11, 2025 by reelentropy
Superman, circa 2025, shielding a small child from harm. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

After 12 excruciating years, Warner Bros. has given up the ghost and paved over the muddy, miserable Man of Steel with a sunny, cheerful new Superman movie, with James Gunn as writer, director and producer and affixed as the chief of a new cinematic DC Universe. This time, there’ll be no debilitating fear of God, no neck snapping and no director’s cuts. 

I want to love Superman, but it’s just OK. What it really fails to do is escape the terrible legacy it inherits. After years of the DCEU desperately responding to criticism in each new entry, the DCU enters the world with the same personnel responding to the same criticism in a lot of the same ways the previous series had settled on by the end.

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OCFF 2025- 12 solid hours in the main theater

Posted on July 6, 2025 by reelentropy

I wouldn’t get up early yesterday for morning yoga – the correct choice, I only got halfway through the session I attended – but I delayed publishing, which is dangerous, so I could make the 11:45 curtain of Videoheaven. This was also the correct choice. David Lowery, Green Knight and Ghost Story director and the most prominent Dallas filmmaker of the past several years, comes out to introduce the documentary. He’s on the Oak Cliff Film Society Board of Directors and has hosted events at the Texas before. It’s the only time I spot him all weekend, and he’s already out of the spotlight before I can get my phone turned back on for a picture.

The theme of the fest this year, “real movies for real movie people,” seems random at first – these things usually do – but after slamming several consecutive lower-budget riffs on Uncut Gems, the selection has morphed into a meditation on what real movies and real movie people are. It’s been a weekend full of films with emotional depth, exploration, charm and artistry that look extremely simple to make, many of them man-with-camera style films carried by shock value and madcap central performances. Several all-time classics can be described that simply.

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OCFF ’25 Saturday: six solid hours in the upstairs theater

Posted on July 5, 2025 by reelentropy

Saturday, the one day that’s always clear and always has the main highlights. This fest it’s Fucktoys, a 16mm pre-millennium fantasy of a prostitute, played by writer/director/executive producer Annapurna Sriram, trying to work her way into enough cash that she can pay her psychic to lift a curse on her. It’s playing in the 160-seat upstairs theater, which was converted from the old balcony a few years back, sandwiched in between $Positions and Reveries: The Mind Prison. This may turn out to have been a mistake.

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OCFF 2025 day two: the real festival is the friends you make along the way

Posted on June 28, 2025 by reelentropy

I won’t log any time at the Texas Theatre today. Over time, as the festival gets more jam-packed, they’ve had to expand venues and put up temporary screens at other venues around Oak Cliff. Tonight’s features are at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center down Jefferson Boulevard and the Oak Cliff Assembly on the other side of the highway, both of which are primarily for stage productions.

Electric Child, another major score for the festival that premiered at Locarno, is our second feature in a row in which the main character spends half the film in a computer. In the film, Sonny (Elliott Crosset Hove) learns that his newborn child has a genetic disorder and will likely die before his first birthday. While his wife wants to focus on the time they have left, Jason pours all his energy into his other, electric child – he’s a programmer developing generalized artificial intelligence with simulations of an adolescent child dropped on a deserted island, tweaking his programming to increase his survival skills with every iteration. The film alternates between scenes in the real world and the simulation, which Jason begins to enter in an attempt to accelerate the tool’s learning in the hopes that it will find a cure for his baby.

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Drifting through opening night of OCFF 2025

Posted on June 27, 2025 by reelentropy

The 2024 Oak Cliff Film Festival was one of my favorite weeks to be a film writer. It was a reason to be strung out all weekend in my favorite place and proof that I could put out content to match it, words burning out through my arms like air after a sprint on a cold day.

I didn’t make it to the 2025 edition, I was out of town focusing on a project that I dropped over the rest of the year, one that I’d made plans to restart this week, but my excuses kept falling away. My time off had to be rescheduled. Friends keep asking if I’ll be there, and I keep feeling awful when I say “no.” I tell myself I needed to save money. The past year, year and a half, it’s felt like every month would be my last, for whatever reason. What else am I going to spend it on?

I haven’t been writing. I don’t know why I haven’t been writing. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. Feels like I have nothing to say. I keep going to the movies, but it feels like I don’t pay any attention.

That’s a dodge. The real draw, what I really can’t force myself to miss, is the eclectic mix of films on offer. For weeks, I see the Texas Theatre advertising some bizarre, mysterious thing with no details and tons of buzz. The most mysterious of these is opening night feature OBEX, a retro-futuristic black and white film that screened at Sundance.

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