Cold in July Sizzler

Sundance shoot 'em up: Dexter and Miami Vice stars have a blast in new Texas thriller

After eight seasons of playing a likable serial killer in Dexter, Michael C. Hall knew it was time to do something different. So when he was approached to portray the owner of a picture-framing store in a small Texas town whose life gets turned upside down when an intruder breaks into his house, Hall jumped at the opportunity.

"I liked that my character wasn't inherently remarkable, yet all these amazing things were happening around him," Hall told a recent standing-room-only audience at a screening of Cold in July at the Sundance Film Festival. "Dexter was winding down at the time, and I really wanted to play a guy who only 'accidentally' kills people."

Based on a novel by Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale, Cold in July is a rock 'em, sock 'em pulp fiction thriller that starts like a house afire — the first 30 minutes will have you on the edge of your seat — before morphing into a buddy comedy with a dark twist and a bloody ending.

"Dexter was winding down at the time, and I really wanted to play a guy who only 'accidentally' kills people." — Michael C. Hall on Cold in July.

Life is pretty routine in an East Texas town until Richard Dane (Hall) shoots and kills a masked man in his living room in the middle of the night. Turns out the burglar is a convicted felon whose father (Sam Shepard) just got released from Huntsville prison and is out for revenge.

I don't want to reveal much more about the movie — it's been purchased by IFC Films for release later this year — because it's much more satisfying to have no idea what happens next. The movie takes a lot of interesting and sometimes implausible twists before its violent conclusion.

After the screening in Utah, the audience had a lot of questions for Hall, director Jim Mickle, Don Johnson (who practically steals the movie as a wily Houston investigator) and Lansdale, the only one on stage with an authentic Texas accent. Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches and is writer-in-residence at Stephen F. Austin State University.

It took Mickle and co-screenwriter Nick Damici, who plays a shady sheriff in the movie, eight years to adapt Lansdale's book and get it on screen. Though it's set in East Texas in the 1980s, the movie was filmed in upstate New York with tax incentives.

"When I heard they were shooting in New York I said, "OOOOH HELL!," Lansdale said. "Then [Mickle] sent two photographs, one of upstate New York and one of East Texas, and I couldn't tell the difference except they had a mountain up there, but we didn't shoot the mountain."

The movie is chock full of 1980s technology and appliances; a cellphone the size of a brick gets a lot of laughs. "They came over to my house and found it all," joked Johnson, who was one of the biggest stars of the decade in the hit '80s television series Miami Vice.

"We had a great art department," Mickle added. "They even made some stuff with photographs on contact paper just applied to wood." And Hall's hair is a modified mullet — the ultimate '80s hairstyle.

Asked how he learned to portray a Texas character, Johnson said, "I went out with a lot of Texas girls," as the audience erupted in laughter. "My daughter Dakota was born in Austin," he added. (Dakota Johnson has snared the lead in the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey, currently being filmed in Canada.)

"I was born in North Carolina ... not exactly Texas," Hall said. "I watched lots of films set in Texas and drew from those, and Joe was on the set to help. I also got inspiration from that mullet hairstyle I was sporting."

A man with a mullet (and a gun): Michael C. Hall stars in Cold in July.

Michael C. Hall in Cold in July Sundance Film Festival

Photo by Ryan Samul Courtesy of Sundance Institute

A man with a mullet (and a gun): Michael C. Hall stars in Cold in July.

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Movie Review

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson face pre-marriage jitters in The Drama

Photo courtesy of A24

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya will be seen together a lot at the movies in 2026, with mega-films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming out later in the year. But fans can get a much more intimate look at the two stars in a film that offers a unique take on relationship struggles, The Drama.

Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a New York couple who are engaged to be married. After a quick-but-effective montage of their courtship, the story joins them as they are just days away from their wedding. As they get all the details like music, flowers, and food finalized, a visit to the caterer with married friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) proves fateful.

A few too many drinks leads to each member of the group deciding to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. While each story is slightly shocking, Emma’s takes the cake, so much so that Charlie starts to question their relationship. As they get closer to the wedding date, Charlie finds it increasingly difficult to get beyond Emma’s revelation, with each real or imagined conversation threatening to derail their previously tight bond.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the film is provocative, funny, and cringey as it tries to get to the center of human dynamics. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike have starkly different reactions to Emma’s story, and the way those play out over the course of the film provides, well, the drama. The harder Charlie tries to justify Emma’s past, the more his underlying feelings start to eat at him, causing friction not just between him and Emma, but in other parts of his life, as well.

Strangely, especially for a character played by Zendaya, Emma recedes more than expected. Her explanations for her previous actions are timid at best, and she mostly seems to be waiting for Charlie to forgive her instead of questioning why she needs forgiveness. Borgli favors the male side of the equation, and in so doing he doesn’t dig as deep into the root of the issue as he could have.

Still, the downward spiral at the center of the story has a propulsive nature to it, and each successive step proves to be both hard to watch and impossible to turn away from. It also helps that Borgli manages the tone well, keeping interactions between characters relatively light so that the film doesn’t turn into one like Marriage Story.

Pattinson, who gets to use his own British accent for once, put on an interesting performance that is much better than his last two roles in Mickey 17 and Die My Love. He has good chemistry with Zendaya, who manages to shine despite being laden with a role that doesn’t play entirely to her strengths. Haim and Athie do good work in small roles, while Hailey Grace and Hannah Gross make an impact in brief appearances.

The situation in which Emma and Charlie find themselves in The Drama is not one to be wished on anyone, but it’s presented well by Borgli, keeping tensions high for the bulk of the film. Despite the two main characters not given completely equal footing, the story finds a way to get to a satisfactory ending.

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The Drama opens in theaters on April 3.

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