Nanni Moretti’s meditation on a family’s trauma in the wake of a teen-age boy’s death in a scuba-diving accident is both spare and unsentimental, and that may surprise those benighted Americans who think all Italians are one part tantrum and one part tomato sauce. Best known here for the 1994…
The rock-and-roll Zapruder film, more or less, highlighted by the ultimate low: the murder of Meredith Hunter, committed by Hell’s Angels during a free show at the Altamont Speedway that proves everything gratis indeed comes with a hell of a price. A film within a film, David and Albert Maysles…
“One man is about to do the unthinkable. No sex. Whatsoever. For…40 Days and 40 Nights.” Um, hello? Is that, like, supposed to be hard? But Matt (Josh Hartnett) isn’t like the rest of us. Beautiful women throw themselves at him daily, and it’s such a problem. Why? Well, he’s…
For a few minutes toward the end of Cross Stage Right: Die! at the Pegasus Theatre, bumbling detective Harry Hunsacker stops bumbling. Under a hypnotic spell cast by his loyal and much smarter assistant, Nigel Grouse (played by Tim Honnoll), Harry suddenly begins to think he’s the reincarnation of Sherlock…
If the stereotypical country-and-western song sounds like “My wife left, my dog ran away and my truck broke down,” then the hackneyed blues song would go something like: “My wife ran off with my best friend, who stole my truck, knocked over my mailbox and hit my dog, then the…
Art critic-historian-essayist-Aussie badass Robert Hughes once wrote of American painter Thomas Cole that he “became something of a national culture hero…His death, opined a newspaper editorial, was ‘a public and national calamity.’ Even allowing for the high rhetorical tint required of such exequies 150 years ago, it’s hard to think…
Just last week, the makers of a film called Pendulum gathered in a brand-new Dallas movie theater to screen their picture. The event was a fund-raiser for both the Susan J. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s Race for the Cure and the trust fund for the children of Pendulum co-star Alissa…
Those possessing a vampire’s keen senses may see through the Goth grunge of The Queen of the Damned to a deeper ideological conflict lurking beneath. On one side there’s novelist Anne Rice, sweepingly sensuous and profoundly humorless, who welcomed the cannibalization of her second and third bloodsucker books to create…
“This isn’t sex–this is pornography!” screams the enraged director when his new cinematographer starts to get too artistic for his own good. As absurd as it sounds, this piece of dialogue from The Fluffer–a cautionary tale of romantic obsession in the adult-video industry–is absolutely correct: The distance between the on-screen…
“Glean” is a word not often used in English, except in the context of gleaning information. But in French it has a more common, more specific use–to pick up produce or other foodstuffs left behind by the harvest. In the mind of veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), it…
With its catchy (if arguably distasteful) title and first-rate cast, How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog promises vastly more than it delivers. An L.A.-based Brit playwright in a slump (Kenneth Branagh) tries to fix his latest play, while arguing with his wife (Robin Wright Penn) about whether to have a…
It’s hard not to love a movie that posits Britney Spears as a nerd, a high school valedictorian, an aspiring med-school student, an amateur mechanic and the spawn of Dan Aykroyd. When she finally reveals that she’s also a poet, sincerely reading Dido’s lyrics for “I’m Not a Girl, Not…
Though it consists of all-new footage, Escaflowne is still a 93-minute condensation of a 26-episode TV series, with all the pitfalls of such you’d expect: too many characters, no reason to care about them, forced dramatic beats and excessive exposition. Matters aren’t helped by a flat, generic English dub. The…
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
With the Winter Olympics schussing NBC’s must-watch sitcoms off the prime-time schedule, fans of Friends and Will & Grace might consider heading over to Kitchen Dog Theater for a fix. Rebound and Gagged, a new play by Aaron Ginsburg, sports all the elements of a successful TV situation comedy: attractive,…
The Dallas Museum of Art and Friends of the Dallas Public Library’s annual Arts and Letters Live literary festival is like the bibliophile’s version of the conventions held for comic-book collectors and sci-fi fanatics. Arts and Letters Live must get a fancier name than “convention” or “expo” because its books…
There’s never been any shortage of praise for Nicolas Cage, about whom Pauline Kael once wrote: “He’s up there in the air, and when you watch him in Raising Arizona or Moonstruck, it’s a little dizzying.” Writers spare no adjective and waste no drop of hyperbole when celebrating Cage, whose…
John Q. Archibald (Denzel Washington), a perfect working-class Everyman, is struggling just to make ends meet; bad turns to way worse when his 9-year-old son (Daniel E. Smith) is suddenly diagnosed with a heart defect that will kill him within weeks unless he can get a transplant. But John, who…
A bombed-out London, fathers shipping off to the front, families left behind to tend to the smoldering rubble, children getting sent to the countryside for safekeeping–sounds like John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, the writer-director’s bittersweet ode to a youth lost to the wreckage of World War II. No such luck:…
Set in Berlin in 1943, this fact-based German film with English subtitles concerns the love affair between two women: a Jew passing as a gentile while working for the underground and a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. Outgoing, direct, supremely self-confident, the…
Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually,…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
