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.
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.
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.
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
⭐
Rating: 1 out of 5.
In Captain America: New World – woah, WOAH! This movie is titled what now? OK. OK, that’s better.
In Captain America: New World Order Brave New World, after the COVID-19 crisis and the 2023 double-strike combined to form a long production pause, the MCU finally returns to the form we saw during the early COVID years – an incredibly overexpensive TV show that charges movie ticket prices per-episode that is deeply inbred, at once desperate for new fans and completely impossible for a new viewer to approach, ugly as sin, a years-long catastrophe of writing and a completely unwatchable disaster of editing.
March, post-election- President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford), last seen officially dismantling the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War as Secretary of State, approaches the end of his first 100 days in office on the edge of brokering a deal to share adamantium, the new near-magical metal that’s been discovered on Celestial Island – you know what? World peace! He’s basically about to broker world peace. He remains anxious and insecure, however, because his daughter still won’t talk to him after he tried to kill her boyfriend, the Hulk, 16 years ago in The Incredible Hulk. On the brink of this historic deal, Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), the genius behind his political maneuvering with the apparent power to control minds whom Ross has kept imprisoned in a blacksite since that time, plots to take his revenge by scuttling the deal and spoiling Ross’ place in history.
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Captain America née Falcon, isn’t really involved with that conflict, he just tries to stop Sterns’ minions whenever he’s in the same room.
Writer/director Oz Perkins’ new masterpiece Longlegs is going to change horror forever. It’s an absolute knockout, eerie, haunting and disquieting while also just joyful enough to put several grins on your face.
Oregon, 1990s- FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), after demonstrating what appear to be clairvoyant powers, is assigned to the case of a horrifying serial killer who murders entire families at a time while appearing to have never even entered their homes. The only evidence of his existence are the encrypted, hand-written notes he leaves at the scenes, signed “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage, who also produces).
Longlegs is a horror masterpiece for several reasons, but the best is the most surface-level – this movie is trying really, really hard to scare and entertain you. As disturbing as the subject matter is and as challenging as the film ends up being, you’re also in for a real show. Cinematographer Andrés Arochi’s every shot is breathtaking, usually in a distinctly scary way but sometimes it’s just generically well-shot, and what moments there are of levity are palpably joyful. You can feel when the film is having fun with you.
Reel Entropy 