The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that have slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Early in Spanish director Carlos Saura’s stunning new film, the 82-year-old protagonist, the great 19th-century painter Francisco de Goya, awakens from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, he suddenly finds himself outdoors…
School’s OutGoodbye, farewell, adiós, Freaks and Geeks; we shall lament your departure no more and content ourselves instead with Tuesday-night reruns on the Fox Family Channel, where the occasional unaired episode still pops up like a Christmas present on December 26. But I will forever lament the demise of the…
Italian-Americans might be glad to note that Two Family House, which focuses on the Italian community on Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun, or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict them as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered racists…
British playwright Shelagh Stephenson worked extensively creating monologues for radio and television broadcasts on the BBC until one of her pieces–the harrowing Find Kinds of Silence, about a sadistic husband and father whose daughters murder him after a lifetime of abuse–earned so much acclaim, folks made the connection that language…
I thoroughly enjoyed Pegasus’ Southwest premiere of Sound-Biting, not for original thoughts on the contemporary, poll-driven political process but because of enough verisimilitude to get a clean, close shave. Eric Coble’s script, here under the direction of Pegasus founder and artistic director Kurt Kleinmann, climaxes with a debate between two…
Tinkerbell, or one of her ilk, has been to Plush, Randall Garrett’s new alternative art gallery on South Akard Street that’s attracting all sorts of people, real and imaginary, including fairies. She’s left a trail of pixie dust and two empty Heineken bottles on the seedy sidewalk in the rundown,…
A Cut AboveThe wide-eyed, hyper-alert, sweaty-palm appeal of horror has not been mine to enjoy. A haunted house named Brigantine Castle on the New Jersey shore took that away from me. I walked in tall–a strutting 6-year-old–but I walked out a whimpering, shivering shell of a boy. More than two…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
While the Washington Capitals shuffle to their hotel, still suffering from a sound thumping absorbed not long before, a Stars fan talks with friends. Clad in his team’s colors, he stands near a concession stand where the floor is sticky from spilt beer. You expect he’s thrilled with the win,…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race, or his controversial stances, or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick-row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
Oh, the plight of the common nebbish, aching to be adored, mugging for attention, and eternally desperate to bag a sexy babe. Sounds familiar, no? That’s because the little fella pops up all over the place, in movies as disparate as Losin’ It, Wings of Desire, and Fight Club, but,…
In recent years, the fabulous Chilean-expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet 60, he has made more than 60 films since his 1968 debut Three…
The first thing to know about The Legend of Drunken Master is that there is no Legend of Drunken Master–not really. Miramax/ Dimension’s new Jackie Chan release is a repackaging of the star’s 1994 Drunken Master 2. This is not inherently a bad thing. Nearly all Jackie Chan buffs–count this…
Maureen Folan (Susan Sargeant), the 40-year-old spinster whose two sisters have abandoned her to care for their frail but wolfishly self-centered, aged mother, Mag (C.J. Critt), recounts a trip she took to England in search of work. The Anglos assailed this uneducated Irish woman with racist vitriol she could barely…
October is probably my favorite month: Reread Ray Bradbury, catch Teatro Dallas’ “Day of the Dead” festival (pushed back, sadly, to November this year), watch The Simpsons Halloween special, and rent the excessively bloody horror films I loved as a kid. I was hoping that Pocket Sandwich Theatre might add…
If you’re bucking for a spot in the annals of art history, you’d best be in the right metropolis at the right time. Certain cities at certain times seem to act as giant petri dishes, experimental laboratories producing remarkable achievements in the arts and sciences. Think Florence during the Renaissance,…
I sat down last week to watch the season premiere of ABC’s much-heralded, much-loved (by critics and, according to early ratings, viewers) Gideon’s Crossing, starring Andre Braugher as a doctor who talks so much it’s a wonder he hears his patients tell him what ails them. ABC presented the show…
Two things stand out in my memory about my freshman year in college. Three things, if you count the short stint on academic probation, which I don’t. One was the 40-minute lecture I got after I stood up in Mass Comm and gamely shouted, “Well, I don’t consider newspaper writing…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and this year’s Autumn in New York…
