Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit, and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
Back in the 1940s, just as the cynical tough guys Cagney and Bogart created were beginning to show signs of iconographic wear and tear, a newer brand of antihero arrived in the form of John Garfield. Better-looking and softer spoken and more articulate than his predecessors, he embodied men every…
Luc Besson — director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element — is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction, but none of them cuts as close to the bone as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as “loosely autobiographical,”…
Pegasus Theatre brings us Eric Coble’s comedy with a few of the company’s patented missteps — comic styles that jar and occasionally grate when blended onstage — intact. But the script is so sturdy and compassionate, and the best performances are so filled with a variety of pleasurable little moments,…
I know I’m not the only critic in Dallas who was startled by the announcement that Kitchen Dog artistic director Dan Day had chosen Chris Carlos to play the title role in Othello. Carlos is one of the most charismatic performers working on our stages, a fellow who radiates good…
On the political side of the Dallas art scene, nothing in years has stirred more muttering expectation than Talley Dunn’s departure from the venerable Gerald Peters Gallery and the subsequent opening of her own venue not more than five miles away. The young Dunn’s name had become synonymous with Peters’…
Another thing coming Jeff Krulik thinks Texas is ready for Heavy Metal Parking Lot, his homage to the passion of Judas Priest fans in the late 1980s, which will be screened at a Good/Bad Art Collective short-art-film event in Denton on November 19. “It did really well at the Austin…
Michael Cain moved back to the metroplex in October 1998 for one reason: to tend to his ailing father, who had been diagnosed with cancer. All at once, he gave up a promising film career in Los Angeles — he had done everything from working as location manager on Carl…
Making movies seems like a dream job. Sure, there’s that pesky loss-of-privacy thing, but it’s got to be better than database entry or bookkeeping, or, well, anything else. But for David Chappelle, making movies is almost like a nine-to-five job. It simply allows him the funds and the time to…
“I had a very passionate temper,” Victorian poet Christina Rossetti once wrote to an intimate about her childhood. “On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized a pair of scissors and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath.” It is perhaps a classic…
Ivan Turgenev had paved the way for Anton Chekhov’s seething domestic storms in 1850 with his play A Month in the Country, which concerned educated individuals vacationing at a summer home who fail to make a love connection and are rendered miserable by it. He caught great acclaim from the…
People are as likely to talk about the architecture of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth as they are to talk about the art. The building is art, many have said, and some argue that its relevance as an aesthetic monument is as important as its function. Louis I…
The dealmaker Local art gallery owners may be worried about the impact hotshots like Ted Pillsbury, new partner with Gerald Peters in Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, and Talley Dunn, principal with Lisa Hirschler Brown in Dunn Brown Contemporary, are going to have on the competitive commercial gallery scene. But…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich. Really, avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared with what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans, and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for 22 years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
Is it possible to be separate and equal? It certainly didn’t work out that way for African-Americans, and when applying the questions to lesbians and gays — who have created their own neighborhoods, restaurants, and film festivals — you inevitably encounter ambivalence. Folks want to be comfortable everywhere, but they…
Dallas artist Arthur James is obsessed. Artman, as he prefers to be known, loves the blues, its history, its legends, and its connections to his hometown. His interest exploded when he moved into the Boyd Hotel building on Elm Street. Almost as though possessed, James began researching the blues history…
If you lie down with critics, you get up with fleas, or some such pestilence. So the winners of the 1999 Dallas Theater Critics Forum Awards can gain solace that a certain persistent itch is at least accompanied by an award for “outstanding excellence in the field of stage virtuosity,”…
