Look, Jurassic World will play for weeks. Weeks! It can wait. The deadCENTER Film Festival, however, begins Wednesday and calls it quits Sunday until next summer rolls around. Now in its 15th year, Oklahoma City’s premier cinema event boasts a busy-as-ever slate, which Oxford Karma has sifted through to unearth the potential gems.
Presented in alphabetical order, these five features can be considered best bets. We didn’t even consider counting This Is Spinal Tap; it just wouldn’t be fair. The 1984 comedy classic screens outdoors on the Myriad Gardens at 9:30 p.m. Friday. It goes to 11.
Anesthesia
8 p.m. Saturday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Tulsa-born actor Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) returns to the director’s chair with this long-gestating project set in New York City. Like Crash, it follows several intersecting storylines; unlike Crash, it could be really good. Among the ensemble: Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Corey Stoll, Gretchen Mol and Kristen Stewart.
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Being Evel
9:30 p.m. Saturday
The Great Lawn at Myriad Botanical Gardens
With this documentary, short-subject Oscar winner Daniel Junge attempts the impossible: to make a good movie about Evel Knievel, the legendary star-spangled stuntman of the ’70s. Why impossible? George Hamilton couldn’t do it. The one guy from CSI with the unibrow couldn’t do it. Heck, Knievel himself couldn’t do it!
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Best of Enemies
6 p.m. Thursday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
If you’ve seen YouTube clips of Gore Vidal making the TV talk-show circuit way back when (as in, the era where guests were allowed to smoke while pontificating), you know the guy came armed with rather pointed bons mots. This documentary finds William F. Buckley Jr. on the receiving end, during televised debates from 1968 – a time when liberals and conservatives mocked one another mercilessly and intelligently (as opposed to today, which pays no mind to the latter).
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The Overnight
8:45 p.m. Friday, 8:15 p.m. Saturday
Williams Theater at Harkins
Fans of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black should know that Taylor Schilling is among the leads of this pitch-black comedy about getting to “know” your new neighbors. Everyone should know in advance that the other two leads, Jason Schwartzman and Adam Scott, drop trou, and we’re not talking shot-from-behind. (Reportedly, they used stunt genitalia, which, as far I know, Evel Knievel never dared attempt.)
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Skid
6 p.m. Saturday
Devon Energy Auditorium
12:15 p.m. Sunday
Midfirst Bank Theater at Harkins
See Skid so you can say, “I knew him when!” And by “him,” I mean director Ryan “Staples” Scott, a bright, young, Yukon-hailing director with terrific comic timing. Several cast members from Scott’s locally shot feature debut, 2012’s Wolf Head, turn up in this equally quirky flight of fancy set in the unfriendly skies (and lensed at airports that OKC and Tulsa travelers will find very familiar).
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Rod Lott reviews random movies at Flick Attack.
