The 1995 film Friday is best remembered as the film that brought actor Chris Tucker to audiences’ attention. A modest hit, it would seem an odd choice for a sequel, but Ice Cube — who co-wrote the original with DJ Pooh, as well as produced and starred — is back…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: a re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure, and famous are woven into a tapestry that represents the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, for golf in Tin Cup, and for pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along…
There is no more imposing actor on television than James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk as though his stomach were full of pasta and the world’s suffering. Never before has so powerful a man been rendered so rickety, so emasculated; he doesn’t breathe so much as he shrugs. Gandolfini, as…
The Harlem Globetrotters are so associated with the 1970s, they could have ended up in flea-market bins beside fondue pots, Saturday Night Fever soundtracks, and Pet Rocks. But they’re what historians refer to as, er, timeless; they’ve existed since 1926, and likely will continue well into the next millennium. No…
“If disenfranchisement is the father of rap,” says one performer in the gospel musical revue Travelin’ Shoes, “then meet its grandpappy — gospel music.” Certainly, you can find threads of black gospel in virtually every popular American musical form; rap and gospel are connected as part of the continuously evolving…
As with most creative forms these days — film, music, writing — it’s nearly impossible to find a work of visual art that doesn’t evoke a work or artist that came before. Pop-culture analysis is bloated with accusations of precedents to the point of becoming a self-perpetuating joke. If we…
Home art invasion Dr. Joseph Kupersztoch recently retired as a professor of microbiology at UT-Southwestern Medical School to pursue his “other passion” — art. He says his family ran Galeria Mer-Kup in Mexico City for 34 years, and after taking early retirement at the age of 55, Kupersztoch planned to…
“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…
Magnolia, the third film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is a brilliant piece of garbage — mesmerizing, but only because you can’t believe someone has the temerity to put so much into so little. Three hours and eight minutes long, and all it has to say at the end is…
Of the readers who bought four million copies, in no fewer than 30 languages, of David Guterson’s 1995 best seller Snow Falling on Cedars, many have likely been looking forward to the movie version. Others have probably been dreading it. For better or worse, this multifarious story about nativist bigotry,…
In the poster art for The Hurricane, Denzel Washington glowers, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to our jaw. He may play a boxer, but this isn’t a boxing movie; indeed, Washington spends nearly two hours caged in a cell. Yet this isn’t a prison picture either — more…
The spirit of Fellini hovers over Train of Life, the third so-called Holocaust comedy to come down the pike. Far superior to either Life Is Beautiful or Jakob the Liar, the French-language production has a silliness and a buffoonish humor reminiscent of Amarcord and Fellini’s Roma, yet somehow it feels…
Here’s the deal. If January 7 rolls around and there still exists some semblance of civilization (damn!), take a trip to — ugh — the Galaxy Club. The club itself doesn’t have much to recommend it: surly doorguys, a merciless no-ins-and-outs policy, shitty bathrooms (pun fully intended), and a chintzy…
The large front door of the Dallas Museum of Natural History opens; a family enters. While her mother is paying, a young girl spots a Christmas tree decorated in origami animals — pandas, frogs, hummingbirds, camels — and runs toward it. She looks up and up, finally noticing the long,…
Note: For the sake of being obnoxiously frank, this critic opts to divulge his favorites while pretending, in keeping with the season, to be hammered on spiked eggnog. Cheers! Honorable Mention: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, directed by George Lucas and his kids. Gimme a light saber to…
1. The Cider House Rules No other film this year captures the complex, bittersweet nature of life so movingly. Michael Caine and Delroy Lindo are standouts in a terrific ensemble cast. Filled with grace, compassion, and humor, this is director Lasse Hallstrom’s best work since My Life as a Dog…
Here I sit, polishing this year’s Jimmy Awards and etching the names of actors, directors, designers, and productions in calligraphic script on the base plaques. Yet I can summon little enthusiasm for theater at the moment. It’s not because of theater itself, but because of the inevitable disruptions and dissipations…
Bill Barter can’t remember exactly when it occurred to him and his fellow Arlington Museum of Art board members that they could lose Joan Davidow. All he can recall is that the board knew losing the museum’s founding director would lead to nothing but turmoil. After all, Davidow is closing…
The mothers of invention It was Richard Franck who actually wrote, “Art imitates Nature” in his Northern Memoirs, printed in 1694; whoever revised it to “art imitates life,” though, nailed a concept that crystallized 1999 on the Dallas-Fort Worth visual art scene. Take tragedy and misfortune, for example; in life,…
A watershed year. That’s the buzz around the film critics’ water cooler — or should that be popcorn stand? — as 1999, and the first century of film, comes to a close. You can hear the whispers as they turn to shrieks of ecstasy: Just like 1974! Such are the…
Film critics are by nature a sour lot, so it is with truly great pleasure I suggest that 1999 has been the best year for cinema — certainly for American cinema and even for the major studios — in my 15 years on the beat. I’m at a loss to…
