Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah, well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions–the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth Branagh version–were relatively straight…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men — a ‘fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner — try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Silence, you who will dismiss Tom Tykwer’s lugubrious follow-up to Run Lola Run as a sophomoric step backward, because Winter Sleepers, shot before Lola in 1997, is a step backward, literally. With this in mind, it’s easier to assess this heady precursor to Tykwer’s later fireworks for its own successes…
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots: Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey’s production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And boy, can…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
There appears to be quite a bit of flux in the Dallas theater scene now, with the ultimate destination for at least two companies still unknown. Right on the heels of the Theatre Three opening of Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or “Schmucks”, the regional premiere of a comedy by Jon Robin Baitz, a…
In the last hour, 23 people in the metroplex will have decided to start their own film festivals — in a theater, perhaps, or maybe in their living rooms or in the back of their vans. Where there was once but a single film fest on the local horizon (the…
With the rise of Latin Americans as formidable consumers and hotly pursued voters, the world premiere of former Dallas playwright Octavio Solis’ Dreamlandia couldn’t be more propitious. Solis’ map of the shifting fault lines between illusion and reality on the Texas-Mexico border, directed by Richard Hamburger, is the centerpiece of…
It’s easy to compound details and build an ominous “trend” for a whole scene, but one sad development I can confirm in this space: New Theatre Company, which since 1994 has produced some of the most disciplined and adventurous state, regional, and national premieres for Dallas audiences, is moving. Not…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic slayings that makes a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crack-up. Bourgeois girls play the precious ‘n’ misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel…
In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for L.A. Confidential, the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), Kim Basinger trembles with fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger looks paralyzed by the prospect of doing a…
East-West, the new film from Oscar-winning French director Regis Wargnier (Indochine), is, like Wargnier’s earlier film, a drama about how political circumstances can dominate personal relations. (Also like Indochine, East-West was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, but lost out to Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother.)…
The highfalutin soap operas in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit, and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
Pegasus Theatre ought to be aware that one of the most successful Dallas Theater Center shows of this current season was, for all practical purposes, a Pegasus production. Of course, departed director Jonathan Moscone brought in out-of-town actors and designers as well as professional multimedia folks to soup up the…
Get a grip, oh ye of little faith, and bear witness. Finally, without question, there’s irrefutable proof that Dallas can produce damn fine art. Drool-on-your-shirt fine. Lo-and-behold fine. It’s not just the stuff from the handful of local artists picked for the Whitney Biennial in New York City that’s serving…
Hickey B. Good Perhaps if you squint in a semidarkened room, Angstrom Gallery owner David Quadrini would look a little like Elvis Presley. At least, he’d be the one singing “Viva Las Vegas” after the April 22 opening and near-sellout of three concurrent solo exhibitions featuring two Vegas-based artists. One…
The thing that most annoys some people about Sandra Bernhard is what others worship in her. Namely, you never know when she’s being serious or sarcastic. A couple of years ago, when her latest one-woman show I’m Still Here…Damn It! was playing to sold-out crowds in New York City, she…
Wolves always get a bad rap. Bedtime stories say they eat grandmothers, blonde girls in red capes, and little pigs who make bad choices in housing materials. Their beady, glowing eyes and mournful howls inspire nightmares and myths. And, according to Neil Jordan’s bizarre fairy-tale-as-erotica film The Company of Wolves,…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
