Taking its cue from Christopher Hitchens’ excoriating, similarly titled book (minus the “s” in “Trials”), this terse and compelling documentary presents the case that former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger deserves to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, under the standards applied to…
Through a strange chain of events, a likable young pianist (Anna Mouglalis) becomes an interloper in the household of an internationally renowned musician (Jacques Dutronc), whom she believes might be her father. He’s sure he’s not, but her appearance proves disturbing to both his son (Rodolphe Pauly) and even more…
Andy Richter, the man who for seven years proved himself the rare late-night television sidekick worthy of being labeled equal partner, is not given to saying nasty things about people who sign his paychecks, a rarity in a business where people are more than happy to bite, then bite off,…
Since airing two hours of absolutely nothing wouldn’t do much for Fox’s ratings or ad revenue on this first night of Hanukkah, the net’s done the next best, by which I mean the next worst, thing: given us The Brady Bunch in the White House, a sorta sequel to 1996’s…
Chaos theorists have suggested that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil might cause a tornado in Texas. Well, we can’t say for sure if the same goes for paper butterflies, but there will be plenty of flapping at Leland Faulkner’s World of Wonder, and if the inverse theory also…
This is the story of David Cross as told only by David Cross, since no one else contacted for this story, this oral history, would comment on the subject of David Cross. That is not entirely true, as no one else was actually contacted for this story; really, who has…
Ethelred the Unready is ready for his close-up. Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of the feuds and foibles of many crowned heads in British history, mainly your sequentially numbered Richards and Henrys. But until Silence, the comedy by Brit playwright Moira Buffini that’s been held over for a…
To judge from the glowing reviews of Horace Clifford (H.C.) Westermann’s traveling retrospective, now on view at Houston’s Menil Collection, it seems a major re-evaluation of this most American of 20th-century sculptors is well under way. Organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Westermann show has been roaming the…
Ah, yes. We remember it like it was yesterday. Taking a mid-afternoon break from high school, tooling down a two-lane blacktop doing 96 mph in a classmate’s jacked-up Chevy SS, smoking a fatty and listening to Skynyrd blaring on his cassette deck. Of course, where we’re from–the backwoods of the…
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, step right up and get yourself a new gay-bingo card. That’s right. It’s that time of the month again for all local queens, and kings, of bingo. Saturday is Big Top GayBINGO night at the Lakewood Theater. Dallas’ own madam of ceremonies Kerri…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
Ah, Halle’s berries. Don’t care much for them personally, as they’re components of an actress (bane of the thinking man), but those golden globes are shifting loads of Hollywood product these days, the latest dose being Die Another Day, the 20th official entry in the 40-year-old James Bond franchise. As…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding-school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself–and that the terrible furies…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around last fall, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a bit off post-September…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
If the title is a Jeopardy question, then the answer might be “How does Steven Seagal come across these days?” or maybe “How will you feel after an 88-minute rip-off of The Rock with action confined to slo-mo gun firing and random glass-shattering?” Seagal, who’s slowly morphing into an untalented…
A tough Paris cop (Jean Reno) flies to Tokyo for the funeral of his great lost love, only to find out that she has left him in charge of the rebellious teen-age daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) whose existence she had kept a secret from him. When the girl turns out to…
It is the essential sexiness of holy archetypes that stirs up a ruckus in Carlos Carrera’s competent if unremarkable tragedy, adapted by screenwriter Vicente Lenero from the 1875 book by Portuguese author Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. We first meet our young, present-day hero (and anti-hero) Padre Amaro (Mexican superstar…
So enchanting it takes your breath away, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action version of the famous fairy tale remains one of the most magical films ever made. Boasting a new print, struck from the restored French negative, and an improved, albeit not perfect, soundtrack, this glorious black-and-white film–in French with English…
