Just in time to take our tired minds off the twin terrors of Osama and Enron comes The Mothman Prophecies, an enjoyable, if utterly stupid, upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre. (That is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events.) The fashionable sheen is…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit on U.S. shores right as…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
Call me conventional, call me coarse, call me crazy, but I prefer my drama, oh, I don’t know, dramatic. Give me a plot with a narrative structure that makes me eager to discover what happens next. Give me characters that are as clever as they are round, who search for…
Imagine this: Actors perform a comic space opera that spans the galaxies, featuring a lone hero battling futuristic evil threatening to undo the galaxy. There are no blue-screen or computer-generated special effects. In fact, apart from cobbled-together sound effects, there are no special effects. There’s just you and the actors…
Julia Roberts has been called the most powerful woman in Hollywood, one of the greatest actors of our time and America’s Sweetheart. Her power is evident: She can make mediocre movies like The Mexican have good openings, she can give a silly speech at the Oscars and look “sincere” and…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
Attended by a rather sexy air of intrigue, the hit French film Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) arrives upon our shores, and, refreshingly, it’s left up to us to figure out just what the hell it is. Monster movie? Costume drama? Martial-arts extravaganza? To say the least,…
Cate Blanchett can do no wrong, but even she can’t save Charlotte Gray, a World War II drama that never rises above the level of a 1950s-era adolescent romance novel. The Australian-born actress, who should have won an Academy Award for her performance in 1998’s Elizabeth, plays the titular character,…
Bangkok Dangerous, by twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is an aggressively commercial genre piece that, like some recent Korean releases, has been clearly influenced by the Asian gangster genre once dominated by the now-ailing Hong Kong industry. And if the Pang brothers’ goal is to demonstrate to the world…
And so, adieu to 2001. The critic is older and crankier, a bit more gray but essentially the same, still given to muttering about “standards” and premature curmudgeonhood. The world, on the other hand, seems to have changed. We are embarking on a new century, finally, by the calendar and…
The Dallas Museum of Art’s new exhibit, European Masterworks, The Foundation for the Arts Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art, contains more than 100 works produced between 1700 and 1950 by Europe’s great masters. These paintings, sculptures and works on paper by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Rodin…
Only a guy very secure in his masculinity would ever say this: I have a weird fascination with romance novels. Maybe it’s because, being the sensitive sort, I’m somewhat interested in what women want, how they think, et cetera. Plus I can’t believe that women can get away with buying…
It’s almost easier to pick the year’s worst than its finest. Leading the pack is I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn does his Rainman dance for Oscar only to watch it horribly misfire, followed closely by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Nic Cage, who, given recent choices, might be mentally challenged),…
Had anyone asked me back in September how 2001 was looking, I would have been tempted to rate it as even worse than the dismal 2000 (which suffered further from proximity to the wondrous 1999). But my assessment shifted during the final quarter of the year–half because of some fine…
Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
When David Quadrini stood on the bank of the East River and watched the World Trade Center collapse, he broke into a spontaneous wail. His knees gave, his eyes watered with overwhelming disbelief, and he knew, like the rest of us, that life couldn’t continue as it had before. But…
The photographs that some theater companies send to promote their plays are dreadful enough to send anyone not dedicated to supporting local stage arts screaming for the hills like hammy actors from a high school production of The Sound of Music. At worst, there’s an exit sign, a hanging mike…
When the press release for the “all-new” Pink Floyd LaserSpectacular hit our desk, our first reaction was to check the calendar. Nope, it’s not 1985. Our second was to inspect the release more closely, in case it was some ancient leftover. (The Dallas Observer’s offices are not what you’d call…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
