For the last few years, we’ve given you reasons—often the same reasons, in different words—to go to the Oak Cliff Film Festival, while singling out a few films that make this year special. We’re essentially going to do the same thing this year, but we’re just going to boil those reasons down to the basics, and keep the flowery prose to a minimum.
The Oak Cliff Film Festival is great. Much of it is at the Texas Theatre, the best movie theater in Dallas, a place you should go to throughout the year. It is consistently showing good and interesting movies. Sometimes old ones. Sometimes new ones. The rest of the Oak Cliff Film Festival is at other swell venues in North Oak Cliff, including the Kessler, the Bishop Arts Theatre, and the Wild Detectives. You should go to those places throughout the year, too.
The Oak Cliff Film Festival used to be what writers like to call “upstart,” but has since become established as one of the best film festivals in town. You could arguably go further with the superlatives than that. The festival settling in a bit, however, has not come at the expense of its programmers’ preference for unusual, occasionally abrasive, far out movies.
This year’s schedule looks really neat. Filmmakers will be in attendance at several screenings. There is live music. Tickets, for the entire festival and for individual screenings, are reasonably priced. It runs this weekend, from June 8 through the 11th. If you like movies, you should go. We’re going.
Rather than single out and recommend a few movies we haven’t seen, we’re going to instead tell you what we plan on seeing. (We’re somehow going to split into two separate but distinct viewing entities at about 5 pm Sunday.) Here’s our weekend schedule:
- Lemon (Texas Theatre, Thursday at 7:30 pm) — Brett Gelman and Michael Cera get weird in this uncomfortable comedy, which seems like a spiritual cousin to 2015 Oak Cliff Film Fest alum Entertainment, another bizarre and irresistibly ugly movie about raw, ostensibly funny people.
- Porto (Texas Theatre, Thursday at 9:45 pm) — Film geeks should appreciate the cinematography (this was shot with Super 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm) of this international love story starring the late Anton Yelchin.
- Golden Exits (Texas Theatre, Friday at 7 pm) — Director Alex Ross Perry, whose last two films (Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth) established him as one of the more compelling indie filmmakers working today, is back with what should be another low-budget stunner about mortally flawed human beings navigating everyday angst.
- A Life in Waves (Texas Theatre, Friday at 9:15 pm) — A documentary about synth legend and early electronic music adopter Suzanne Ciani is followed by live music behind the screen, featuring New Fumes and Dallas Acid.
- The Challenge (Kessler Theater, Saturday at 12:30 pm) — This sort of abstract documentary very loosely about falconry in Qatar focuses on the bloody sport’s conspicuously wealthy practitioners, at least one of whom drives his Lamborghini with a cheetah riding shotgun.
- True Conviction (Kessler Theater, Saturday at 2:30 pm) — The documentary follows three Dallas men working to free the wrongfully convicted, a very worthwhile story about one of our criminal justice system’s most glaring injustices.
- California Dreams (Bishop Arts Theatre, Saturday at 4:15 pm) — You’re unlikely to find many facts, but you should stumble on some truth while watching this semi-documentary about would-be actors whose Hollywood aspirations are eating them alive.
- Cinema 16 Shorts (Basement Gallery, Saturday at 5 pm) — A 16 mm shorts block.
- Endless Poetry (Texas Theatre, Saturday at 7:15 pm) — The new Alejandro Jodorowsky joint looks to have all the hallmarks of the cult director’s best work — striking surreal images, fragmented dream logic, drugs — while also serving as an authentic autobiographical look at his upbringing in Chile. Actor Adan Jodorowsky (Alejandro’s son) performs after the movie.
- Documentary Shorts (Kessler Theater, Sunday at 1 pm)
- Lucky (Alamo Drafthouse Cedars, Sunday at 5 pm) — The great Harry Dean Stanton is 90 years old, and not entirely comfortable with that fact, in this desert-set feature that also stars David Lynch as a man in search of his turtle.
- The Little Hours (Texas Theatre, Sunday at 5 pm) — Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza are bad nuns in this saucy comedy, an adaptation of a story from medieval author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
- A Ghost Story (Texas Theatre, Sunday at 8 pm) — Local boy done good David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon) is in the house for what is being trumpeted as his best film yet, a supernatural journey through life’s existential questions, filmed in and around Dallas, and starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara.
