There should be more submarine movies. They provide a no-brainer formula for success: claustrophobic setting, invisible enemy whose approach must be estimated, inherent threat of drowning and depth pressure, and from a budgetary standpoint, one key set is really all that’s needed. There’s even a solid track record to draw…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is great sport among the literati to remember…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug-of-war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment, and simple…
Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whirr of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…
There are at least three people trying to ignore the truth in what has become a defining moment of their lives in Man of the Moment, the sometimes sad, sometimes acidic 1988 comedy by Alan Ayckbourn. The fact that this moment — a 17-year-old bank robbery thwarted by a meek…
“The only things the United States has given the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails” is a quote attributed to the martyred Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. “And they make better cocktails in Cuba.” This assessment was made after a two-year stay in New York City, during which his most…
Moving the Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival and the nearly half-million North Texans who flock to browse its arts- and crafts-filled booths, suck the marrow out of turkey legs, and swill margaritas made with wine instead of tequila was harder on the organizers than it was on the crowds…
It’s quite possible American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option one chooses to accept…
You will cry when Keeping the Faith ends, if only because, after 130 minutes, the damned thing is over. They will be tears of gratitude, like those shed by marathon runners as they cross the finish line, broken and spent. There is only so much the human body can endure…
Where the Money Is is the latest attempt at a geezer vehicle — in this case for Paul Newman. Despite his unassailable movie-star credentials and his still-handsome mug, Newman is faced with the inevitable dilemma of the leading man: Either make a film that appeals only to other oldsters, step…
Rehab, sweet rehab. Last resort of the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the would-be suicide. Free room and board, lots of tender loving care, and a whole herd of fellow recovering screw-ups who’ll always be there for you, who are willing to apologize and admit their imperfections at the drop…
Editor’s note: This review originally ran in the Dallas Observer on April 29, 1999, when the film was shown as part of the USA Film Festival, before it was released nationwide. Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to…
Last October, when I was a guest on KERA 90.1’s The Glenn Mitchell Show discussing the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum awards, a woman called in and bluntly asked, as per my solitary pan of Dallas Theater Center’s South Pacific, “What’s wrong with Jimmy Fowler’s mind?” Was this Richard Hamburger,…
There is so much good will straining against the levees of Tomfoolery, a buttoned-down revue of satirical tunes by 72-year-old smartass Tom Lehrer, that you don’t mind when, midway through, it floods over the songwriter’s self-conscious cleverness and cuteness. Because, after a while, the charisma of three men and three…
Storm troupers The 15th year of the big art show must go on, but downtown Fort Worth is still a mess, so organizers have moved the behemoth Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival at the last minute out of tornado-ravaged downtown and over to the city’s cultural district. The April…
In Texas, we’re fascinated with the weather. In other parts of the country, people don’t really say, “Looks like it’s gonna rain,” or “They say it’ll cool off tomorrow.” Outside of Chicago, strangers don’t just walk up to you and say, “Sure is windy out here.” In Montana or L.A…
Poetry is for wimps — or so the stereotype goes. It’s a safe haven for overly sensitive tree-huggers who bare their souls. They’re not considered perceptive, or honest, or eloquent; no, these poets are labeled as rare beef: too tender and pink. Then there’s slam poetry, with its young, defiant…
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
On the surface — and that’s all the movie is, a puddle instead of a lake — Return to Me is a hackneyed, silly, slapdash film. Whole scenes look, if not out of focus, then at least a little blurry, as though we’re missing something just out of frame. And…
Allow pitch-perfect Bijou Phillips, who plays hip-hopping uptown white girl Charlie, to set the tone for Black and White with her address to her stern father: “I’m havin’ a good day, goin’ wit’ my friends to da liberry an’ shit, but you have to go and ruin it for me!”…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy, “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
