The Dallas Museum of Art and Friends of the Dallas Public Library’s annual Arts and Letters Live literary festival is like the bibliophile’s version of the conventions held for comic-book collectors and sci-fi fanatics. Arts and Letters Live must get a fancier name than “convention” or “expo” because its books…
There’s never been any shortage of praise for Nicolas Cage, about whom Pauline Kael once wrote: “He’s up there in the air, and when you watch him in Raising Arizona or Moonstruck, it’s a little dizzying.” Writers spare no adjective and waste no drop of hyperbole when celebrating Cage, whose…
John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington), a perfect working-class Everyman, is struggling just to make ends meet; bad turns to way worse when his 9-year-old son (Daniel E. Smith) is suddenly diagnosed with a heart defect that will kill him within weeks unless he can get a transplant. But John, who…
A bombed-out London, fathers shipping off to the front, families left behind to tend to the smoldering rubble, children getting sent to the countryside for safekeeping–sounds like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, the writer-director’s bittersweet ode to a youth lost to the wreckage of World War II. No such luck:…
Set in Berlin in 1943, this fact-based German film with English subtitles concerns the love affair between two women: a Jew passing as a gentile while working for the underground and a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. Outgoing, direct, supremely self-confident, the…
Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually,…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
The perfect antidote to the epidemic of bad acting and anemic material infecting Dallas stages this winter is Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet at Addison’s WaterTower Theatre. A wonderfully acted, bitingly witty paean to Willy the Shake and all things theatrical, the play also aims healthy doses of good-natured ribbing…
The phrase “car show” typically conjures, within the hipper-than-thou set, images of beer guts, mullets and cheap beer poured into said guts. It is, in the eyes of these trendsetters, one step above a truck-and-tractor pull. But it doesn’t take too much investigation into the 42nd Annual O’Reilly Auto Parts…
When Ellen DeGeneres hosted the Emmys this past fall, she asked in her introduction, “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?” We’ve got a hunch: a single day featuring hundreds of performances of Eve Ensler’s Obie Award-winning play The Vagina…
Hart’s War, like most mediocre films, is little more than a movie about the movies. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape;…
After a long absence from American screens, British stage director Richard Eyre makes his return with an alternately depressing and uplifting drama about Dame Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and the heroic efforts of her husband, John Bayley, to care for her, despite his own advanced age and generally…
Every couple of years, it seems, we’re obliged to get at least one documentary that provides the revelation that porn stars just aren’t happy people. So now we know John Holmes was a drug addict and a criminal, Annabel Chong cuts herself and Stacy Valentine will submit to every surgical…
In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
Though he takes a beating early on, watching his wife and son die in an embassy bombing carried out by Marxist, drug-running Colombian terrorists, it isn’t long before Arnold Schwarzenegger is striding through the jungles of Colombia as if on a Stairmaster, ignoring admonitions that to do so is “frickin’…
A bland, obnoxious 88-minute infomercial for Universal Studios and its ancillary products, chief among them birthday boy E.T. (due for re-release this spring) and the studio tour, this is a kids film for children who won’t shut up; it’s loud enough to be heard over the deafening chatter of restless…
This epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, finishes up with a rare note of whimsy. But first Kieslowski revs up the emotional wringer one last time for episode IX, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” in which a doctor must face…
When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers…
Remember when going to the theater felt like an escape from television? Great live theater once offered what so much prime-time TV did not: casts of fascinating characters saying magical, poetic, sometimes shocking lines of dialogue penned by bold young playwrights who wrangled with complex, provocative messages in their work…
Most people don’t watch Jennifer Lopez to check out how accurate her flamenco dance steps are. We doubt they even notice her feet. Still, Dallas flamenco dancer and promoter Julia Alcántara believes anything–even a scantily clad pop singer–that draws attention to the ancient and constantly maturing Spanish gypsy art is…
