Pineapple Express is a buddy drug comedy that even the most straight-laced will enjoy, even though it does smell super dank, dude. More Superbad and less Cheech and Chong, this bromantic comedy is about the love of two wannabe friends, and their love of Mary Jane. ...

Heads up, film fans! The Austin Film Festival may still be several weeks away, but the reels of independent cinema are definitely in motion. ...

What is it about science fiction that gets us so excited? It seems society has been obsessed with the future and what magical wonders it might hold since…well, since the discovery of time. This week, the Paramount continues its Summer Film Series with some old school Sci-Fi from way back—in double feature mode no less, so you really can feel like you’re back in the Day....

This Thursday, the Austin Film Festival gives you a free (or cheapish) screening of the new doc "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections." You probably guessed already that the "new math" referred to here is not some fancy-pants non-Euclidean geometry, but rather the way that election returns have gotten easier and easier for unscrupulous parties to screw around with....

Forget the old Monica scandal, what about this new Monica? She's way worse. Military reverses itself, admits to killing innocent Iraqi commuters. Blackwater: the friendly face of your local small business? In what sounds like it should be a political no-brainer, Congress agrees to ban nasty toxins from kids' toys. Remember when you swore you'd quit smoking when they invented a functional jetpack? Get your gum ready... Christopher Nolan gets all modest on us.......

Through candid interviews with Wesley's friends, family, ex-roommates and patrons, Wesley Willis's Joyrides follows the larger-than-life musician's path from Chicago street artist to underground rock hero, all the way until his death in 2003 from leukemia. Poignant, funny and heartrendingly sad, Joyrides is a must-see for fans, and a riveting crash course for the uninitiated. Definitely go see it tonight....

With the sucker punch to the gut that was The Dark Knight, Step Brothers provides some hearty laughs that aren’t even given away in the trailer (go figure!). While not nearly as sidesplitting as Apatow’s other productions and perhaps too little of heart and humanity, Step Brothers has some memorable parts that include man bits, boats and hos, and a singing voice likened to a mixture of Fergie and Jesus. It reminds us that Ferrell is still really funny without his 70s getups or sports movies, and, really, we could watch a whole movie of Reilly’s facial expressions and doughy eyes. As long as Adam Scott doesn’t show up… ...

Shot in Austin, Kabluey is one of those films that you may not have heard a lot about, which gives it the unique capability to sneak up on you and snatch your heart away. Granted, it does exist in a seemingly alternate universe with a penchant for absurdity, but it has heart. After winning the 2007 Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival, Kabluey has gone on to acclaim in New York and LA, and thankfully opens to the Austin audience tonight at the Landmark Dobie Theater, with Predergast in attendance! We recently had the chance to chat with Prendergast about creating isolation, winning the lottery and trying not to die inside a big, blue mascot suit in the heat of a Texas July....

Suspense, people! Suspense is what makes life exciting—the hollow, wrung out pit in your stomach and the stinking jitters of an overactive imagination. A world of confusion is jumbled before you, tiny mismatched puzzle pieces of tension and worry, and in order to get to the end of this, your very own choose-your-own-adventure, you must sleuth and scheme to finally turn over that missing piece. The Paramount knows how to create dramatic, palpable tension and they plan to do it with vigor tonight and Friday with their screenings of two salacious flicks that will sucker punch you in the anxiety glands with a double shot of Robert Redford. Thankfully, your banker won't slip into payment paranoia as you can get the double feature for a cool $7....

When one thinks of B-movie icon Roger Corman's disciples, big names spring to mind: Coppola and Scorsese come first, followed by genre directors like Jack Hill. One name that's not so immediate is Monte Hellman, but for cinéastes, it's nearly as important. Hellman's films are often concerned with obsession, ambiguity, and genre in a manner that manages to be simultaneously intriguing, fairly abstract and avant-garde. ...

This Tuesday, the folks at the Alamo Drafthouse are hosting an extremely rare 35mm screening of Enzo Castellari's original Inglorious Bastards, currently being remade by Quentin Tarantino. By all accounts, is utterly badass (Fred Williamson is in it... isn't that enough for you?). The screening is FREE, and although RSVP priority was given to Fantastic Fest badgeholders, there will be some tickets available at the door. Come one, come all....

Mamma Mia! is offered as an (extreme) alternative to the Batman film at the theaters this weekend. The basic gist of the musical is: girl is getting married, girl has no clue who her father is, girl invites three men she read about in her mother's diary to her wedding, men come to Greek island where she lives with her mom, and hilarity (and much singing) ensues....

With more than 1,600 weekend screenings of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight already sold out (according to movietickets.com), it's quickly shaping up to be one of the summer's hottest flicks. So hot, in fact, that we had to stage a brutal dance-fight for the right to review it. Austinist contributors Luke Quinton and Darcie Duttweiler both caught IMAX screenings earlier this week, and what follows is a conversation about human nature, Oscar nominations, and shirtless Christan Bale....

PaperDolls Magazine is an online publication looking to shove aside teenage stereotypes while being a little sassy. To raise awareness and cash for their commendable project, they’re staging a four-part, girl-themed film series featuring slumber party classics like Shag, Mean Girls and Heathers. ...

Tum (Lalita Panyopas) is having a totally crap week. She has lost her job as a bank teller, but can't bring herself to tell her family, as they are all depending on her for survival. For a brief moment, Tum contemplates pulling the trigger on her hopeless life, but thinks better of it, and soon thereafter discovers a noodle box on her doorstep, filled with cold hard cash. Now, you would think that the first thing she would do with her windfall is fix that stupid number on her door that keeps swinging around, but she is soon distracted by more, um, pressing matters....

The 15th Annual Austin Film Festival is only a few months away, but you've still got one more day to submit your film for consideration. The "very late postmark deadline" is tomorrow, Tuesday July 15th. So you've got 24 hours to submit your film for consideration in one of six categories (Narrative Feature, Narrative Short, Narrative Student Short, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short, and Animated Short). The easiest (and cheapest) way is to submit over the......

Bigger, badder, and exponentially goofier than its predecessor, Hellboy II is a heck of a lot of fun. The action is great, the visual effects are impressive and the humor is (mostly) dead on. Perlman is absolutely perfect as the beer-swilling, cigar-chomping superhero (Ron doesn't get enough respect, in our opinion), and del Toro's fantastical vision is just as stunningly realized as it was in his critically acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth....

According to a recent email newsletter, Waterloo Records will be "exiting the video rental business", and will be closing their Waterloo Video store in mid-August. But it's not all doom and gloom--they'll also be remodeling the Waterloo Records space this summer in order to make room for all the displaced non-rental DVDs, and all current Waterloo Video employees have been offered positions at the remodeled store to "[assure] the continuity of [Waterloo's] renown personalized video customer service." But the even better news can be summed up in one unnecessarily capitalized word: SSAALLEE!...

Henri Verdoux, of course played by Chaplin, is a Perraultian Bluebeard, who, after being nixed from his job as a bank teller, provides for his ailing wife and young child by charming, marrying and subsequently offing independently wealthy femmes, collecting the spoils in the wake of their wakes. You see, Mr Verdoux sees murder as nothing more than a business proposition, and if large corporations can fill mass graves and their pockets at the same time, then why shouldn't he be able to follow in lock-step, albeit on a much smaller and more personal scale?...

Local filmmaker Bradley Beesley will be at the Alamo tonight to screen and chat about his films Okie Noodling II, and Summercamp!. Noodling, (about the revived sport of hand-fishing) was shot in Oklahoma in the late '90s, and won the 2001 Audience Choice award at SXSW, as well as first runner up for Best Documentary. Noodling II is the follow-up. Summercamp!, directed by Beesley and Sarah Price (American Movie), shows what being a kid at camp is about....

still from When Did You Last See Your Father? Ahhhh, what could have been. We're a little tore up from watching the new Colin Firth flick When Did You Last See Your Father? this week; a reaction to watching the fine acting of Jim Broadbent run headfirst into a script about the pitfalls of puberty. The book by the same name received staggering reviews as a popular memoir that refused to pander, and acted as......

PaperDolls Magazine is asking if you wanna, like, hang out tonight. This teen-oriented, soon-to-be-launched zine kicks off a summer series of cleverly paired films with “Frienemy Night”–an outdoor showing of two high school comedies with bite. ...

Wednesday nights can be tough. It’s the middle of the week, you’re not quite over the hump, and there’s nothing to do—nothing on television (“So You Think You Can Dance?” Come on!),and you’ve got to get up early tomorrow anyway, so how to pass the evening? How about a magical journey back to one of the most unique movies ever made (and later, less uniquely, re-made). We’re talking, of course, about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Your good friends at the Alamo and 101X present a special screening in the lawn of Central Market tonight....

Booze? Check. Will Smith? Check. Witticisms a la Jason Bateman? You bet your sweet ass. Superhero-y good times? You got it. Hancock proves that even if it rains this July 4th, there still might be some fireworks. ...

Finalists for the 2008 SXSWclick Online Shorts Festival have been announced, and you can watch them all on the festival's website. The selected shorts are competing for various prizes, and a slot at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. The finalists are divided into five categories: "Old School Shorts", "Really Real Shorts", "Animate-It", "Sound Checks", and "What the F*#!?". This year's judges include Jeffrey Tambor, Don Hertzfeldt, Doug Benson and Eugene Mirman among others--but the general......

Who knew that an emoting robot could steal your heart so quickly and effortlessly? It only takes a moment for your eyes to meet those of Wall-E, the newest pipsqueak of a trash compactor from the magicians at Pixar. But in that moment, gazing into the mechanization of his little binocular face, you realize that you could love his bleeping robot heart your whole life long....

The name “James Dean” brings an image immediately to mind: the loner with perfect hair, smoking a cigarette coolly, squinting at the other young punks around him, unafraid of anything—bad to the bone. He doesn’t need much of an introduction, and neither does Rebel Without A Cause, playing at the Henry Ransom Center tonight as part of their “Rebel Classics” Film Series....

Sonic Youth has been getting a lot of attention lately, to the point where they're appearing in really weird places, like "Fresh Air" and stuff. This seems strange to us, since we treasured our cassette of "Goo" in ninth grade and certainly would never have thought of SY as NPR-approved Culture. Thankfully, the new documentary Sleeping Nights Awake is a bit different from these official sanctifications of Kim, Thurston, et al....

It’s too late to submit an entry to the first annual Bootstrap Film Festival, but sensitive entrepreneurs, aspiring Linklaters and anyone interested in the Octopus Club’s colorful art auction or stories about mystical cab drivers may want to check out this interactive, hybrid event to be held this Thursday night....

Get Smart PosterGet Smart We’re not ashamed to admit that we caught Evan Almighty on HBO just to see if Steve Carell was slightly funny. (No, he was not.) And maybe The Office is not quite as hil-ar-i-ous as it used to be. And so what if Dan in Real Life flat-out sucked nuts? We really want to give Carell the benefit of the doubt here, and we’re guessing so will thousands of movie-goers this......