It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sexuality was no fun — in the worst possible way…
Fortune has smiled on Brendan Fraser. The star of the new Dudley Do-Right looks great in or out of his clothes; has an easy, self-effacing likability on screen; and seems unafflicted with any pressing need to be taken seriously. If he’s no more than modestly talented as an actor, he’s…
As the late, legendary English critic Kenneth Tynan noted in his 1977 profile of the playwright Tom Stoppard, who was only that year enjoying the first decade of his theatrical success after his early smash hit Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard is something of a rare fauna in the…
The temptation to label the seven women, who met in art class at SMU and have maintained a loosely constructed collaboration in fine art for nearly 15 years, is uncontrollable. Even as you try to resist it, a litany of stereotypes comes to mind — housewives, mothers, grandmothers, DMA docents,…
After a spring season of veteran exhibitions, the new artists swarm into the light during these boiling summer months like cockroaches driven out from beneath the fridge. The galleries fill this otherwise dead time and space with emerging artist shows, and right now, Craighead-Green has one of the best samplers…
This is the story of an incredible journey — not the Disney story about two dogs and a cat, but the history of a 72-year-old theater organ. (Yes, theater organ, but don’t stop reading.) This isn’t the kind of organ used by churches or for classical music. It was designed…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers such as Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror –…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good-dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films such…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…
John Turturro may be best known as an actor, having appeared in such films as Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink, and Quiz Show, but the man speaks like a writer-director. He likes to talk about the themes of his films, and about the way one character’s actions and personality…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress. American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
OK, let’s see a show of hands from everyone who wants to retire the phrase “performance art” from the critical lexicon. Included in the sea of upraised palms are Laurie Anderson, Tim Miller, and two Dallas writer-actors, Dalton James and John S. Davies — enough votes to spur this humble…
When twentysomething Lisa Ling, new co-host of ABC-TV’s popular talk show, The View, romped through Dallas last month promoting the show and purporting to be hip, she was still getting flack from assembled fans about a major faux pas she had made on a recent episode. In the program’s “Know…
Guerrilla tactics You’d think Frank Campagna would’ve learned his lesson back in 1993, when he took a merry band of fellow Deep Ellum artists to the streets and turned the Good-Latimer tunnels into a riot of visual art. “We took it from idea to execution in six weeks the first…
Texas Rangers fans don’t need an entire book offering them reasons to hate the New York Yankees. The results of last year’s American League Division Series still burn deep in the memory — the way the Yanks kept Texas to only one run during the entirety of the all-too-brief three-game…
In 1924, a tall-hatted, big-mustached, slow-limping, long-gazing cowboy rides into the oil-boom town of Cromwell, Oklahoma, to help keep good folks safe from bootlegging gangsters armed with machine guns. Guess the ending. It’s not hard. After all, there are only two types of Westerns: the kind that end with the…
Whatever you do in this life, don’t go looking for answers in a locker room. They just aren’t there. You won’t find them lying beneath the damp towels or the dirty jocks or the discarded clichés. You won’t find them hanging in a locker next to silk shirts and jars…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when they do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply to perform…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
You don’t have to believe in ghosts, Haunting-style, to perceive the specter of Orson Welles hovering about The Big Brass Ring, debuting this week on Showtime. George Hickenlooper’s film is based on Welles’ last completed screenplay, co-written with Oja Kodar in the early ’80s. It has been substantially altered and…
