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Bonnie and Clyde takes top billing at Dallas International Film Festival

The full schedule of films for the 2017 Dallas International Film Festival has been released, and it's one that will devote time to honoring film's past as much as its present and future.

Taking place March 30 through April 9 at various locations around Dallas, the 11th edition of the festival will be headlined by a special 50th anniversary screening of Bonnie and Clyde on opening weekend, as well as Centerpiece screenings of Brett Haley’s The Hero and Mark Palansky’s Rememory, both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. In all, the festival will feature 122 films from 31 countries, including 75 features and 47 shorts.

The screening of Bonnie and Clyde is part of a festival-long salute to the films of 1967. Other films from that year that will be screened include Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which will include an appearance by star Katharine Houghton; Camelot; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Cool Hand Luke; David Holzman's Diary; and The Jungle Book.

The Hero stars Sam Elliot as an aging actor who has to wrestle with the conflicting emotions of a cancer diagnosis and a budding relationship with a much younger woman. The film also features Laura Prepon, Krysten Ritter, Nick Offerman, and Katharine Ross. Rememory stars Peter Dinklage as a man using a new technology to mine his memory for a traumatic incident in his past in order to come to terms with it. The cast also includes Martin Donovan, Julia Ormand, and Anton Yelchin in one of his final roles.

Honored this year with the L.M. “Kit” Carson Maverick Award will be writer/director David Gordon Green, who has had several of his films featured at the festival, including Snow in 2004, Joe in 2014, and Manglehorn in 2015. Green will receive the award during the DFS Honors, participate in a special conversation, and screen his 2008 comedy Pineapple Express.

The festival will also have four world premieres, including Craig Elrod’s Mustang Island, about a man’s attempt to woo his girlfriend back after a breakup on New Year’s Eve; Russ Kendall’s documentary Man in the Camo Jacket, about Mike Peters' journey from rock star to advocate for cancer patients around the world; Jameson Brooks’ Bomb City, about a controversial hate crime that takes place in a small, conservative Texas town.; and Micah Barber’s Into the Who Knows!, a family-friendly selection that follows a boy and his best friend, Felix the Fox, as they escape summer camp to embark on a big mystical adventure.

Other notable films include The Lost City of Z, starring Charlie Hunnam, Tom Holland, Sienna Miller, and Robert Pattinson; The Promise, starring Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon, and Christian Bale; Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary by Steve James; Whose Streets?, a documentary about how the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown inspired a social movement; and an outdoor screening of 2016's live action Pete's Dragon.

Venues for festival screenings and other events include Dallas City Performance Hall, Angelika Film Center Dallas, Magnolia Theatre, Main Street Garden, The Highland, SMU Meadows Museum, and Texas Theatre.

Full festival passes are now on sale. Dallas Film Society members can exclusively purchase individual screening tickets, which cost $12 apiece, online at diff2017.dallasfilm.org through Wednesday, March 15. Online ticket sales open to the public on Thursday, March 16. A physical box office, located at 3636 McKinney Ave. Suite 130, in West Village, will open on Monday, March 20.

Bonnie and Clyde will be the opening night film for the 2017 Dallas International Film Festival.

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde

Photo courtesy of the Alamo Drafthouse

Bonnie and Clyde will be the opening night film for the 2017 Dallas International Film Festival.

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Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first but not by much

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films likeM3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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