The last time the McKinney Avenue Contemporary invited an artist to slap black paper cut-outs on its white-walled gallery, controversy ensued. Back in January 1999, Kara Walker waxed the MAC’s walls and posted black-paper silhouettes depicting sexual atrocities and violence which were as dark as her intended commentary on America’s…
It only figures that the best channel on television is one dedicated to showing ancient films, these glorious black-and-white shadows. Turner Classic Movies is an oasis in the satellite-TV wasteland; when there’s nothing else on, and there never is, TCM generously allows the casual fan and fetishistic student to travel…
Celestial Rhythm Celebrations’ Summer SolstiCelebration began as a poet’s roundtable that met regularly at Club Dada in Deep Ellum. One of the nights fell on the same day as the summer solstice–known to most folks as the first day of summer–so Dallas literary fixture and poet Joe Stanco, who passed…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future…
It’s easy to love Robin Tunney–she’s pretty, and she can act–but it gets harder and harder to understand her choices. The Craft was a good call, and undoubtedly furthered her options, as it did for co-stars Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk. But many of her parts since that 1996 film…
Iranian director Majid Majidi received a mantelful of awards, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and got some American attention for his 1997 feature Children of Heaven, the simple story of a little boy who loses a pair of shoes and goes to great lengths to keep…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another–growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually in a…
Naked emotion is a tricky thing to sell, especially in semiautobiographical films about confused mama’s boys gradually learning that life exists beyond the control of their lens. The latter two of this cut’s three hours richly expand upon the romantic longing (for Agnese Nano young, Brigitte Fossey older) and deliver…
This thoughtful and somewhat languid adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play finds its beauty in the heady performance of Charlotte Rampling as Lyubov, childlike matriarch of a fast-fading period of social polarity. Returning from a long-term Paris retreat to her Russian estate and its complex web of disparate characters, not…
The challenge faced here by writer-director Robert Guédiguian (Charge!) is to keep his cheap melodrama from curdling his insightful societal appraisal. Michèle (Ariane Ascaride) is a dutiful young grandmother in Marseille, working nights packing fish to support her useless husband, Claude (Pierre Banderet), her junkie-prostitute daughter Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier) and…
Somewhere outside the Magic Kingdom, there are bored people. Blissfully unaware of the suits who design the multiplex fodder they’ll be mentally munching, these people discover a movie about a pug-nosed and pugnacious little Hawaiian girl bearing the boy’s name of Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) and her barely adult…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
Small-town life gets a brutal but hilarious going-over in Sordid Lives, Del Hughes’ comedy playing at the Trinity River Arts Center. Make that small-town Texas life. The kind of small Texas town where men have big bellies, women have big hair and everybody has a big mouth. This is the…
You’re at a poetry reading. The emcee strolls to the center of a set adorned with a long couch, a table, a lamp and other cozy home accoutrements. “Welcome to my living room. You’re just a fly on the wall,” she says. A young, guitar case-toting musician wearing baggy blue…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward: It is bereft of twists (instead, we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that to entertain it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
We’ve only ourselves to blame. Our love for, if not obsession with, the detritus of popular culture has led us here–once more, into a theater screening a multimillion-dollar adaptation of a cartoon that always looked like it cost $4.93 to manufacture. (Of the cartoons proffered by William Hanna and Joseph…
The humidity outside, and even inside the Adolphus Hotel’s hallways, is stifling, but Nic Cage doesn’t sweat it–even in a leather jacket (with requisite fringes), black boots (wrapped in silver chains) and dark jeans, which makes one think he’s still Wild at Heart. He’s dolled up junket-style, playing mean and…
The swaggering neo-Nazi skinhead played here to scary effect by Ryan Gosling takes equal delight in punching out a frightened Talmudic scholar and justifying fascism with his articulate verbal harangues. But something distinguishes him from Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper and Edward Norton in American History X. Gosling’s Daniel Balint…
Sold as a romantic comedy about a 31-year-old grad student unable to find (or unwilling to choose) a bride, Dover Koshashvili’s second feature is hardly madcap or even touching. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) is no Bachelor being chased down the street by a mob of would-be brides. He’s merely torn–between his…
“Circuit parties,” the massive days-long gay events held periodically in major cities and fashionable resort towns nationwide, are a subject ripe for movie treatment, and Dirk Shafer’s film does a good job of capturing this scene, particularly its destructive side. While dance parties are supposedly celebratory events, “circuit” affairs are…
This is the kind of film Robert Forster starred in before his career was resurrected by Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Brown; it’s direct-to-video, by way of Starz! Forster stars as Eddie Miller, a traveling diamond salesman on his way out after a heart attack renders him uninsurable. He stays on…
