In the 174 years since Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes died, he has been celebrated, explicated, copied, collected and feared by everyone who matters. Painters from Delacroix to the YBAs (Young British Artists) have looked to him for inspiration. Writers from Baudelaire to Robert Hughes have sung his praises…
I have two indelible childhood memories of other people’s weddings. There’s the one where a distant relative, built like a knackwurst and thoroughly schnockered, fell backward off her barstool, hitting the floor with a huge smack and sending her fake pearls and fruity cocktail skittering and splattering across the tiles…
When the SamulNori comes, it brings rain, lightning, clouds and wind. But it’s not a weather condition. It’s a Korean percussion ensemble whose name means “to play four parts” or “mastery of four things,” which is exactly what these four guys do. One each covers the four traditional instruments: a…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
All those war epics the big movie studios are rushing into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happens to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean-counters. It was…
Sean Penn began 2001 by directing one of the year’s most deeply felt films, The Pledge, in which a frazzled, disconnected Jack Nicholson played a retired cop obsessed with solving the rape and murder of a young girl. He ended it by acting in one of the year’s most woefully…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that doesn’t mean to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
There is nothing terribly wrong with Kevin Reynolds’ The Count of Monte Cristo, which the Internet Movie Database lists as the 18th remake of Alexandre Dumas’ tale of innocence betrayed and avenged. It is neither a drag nor a gas; it neither betrays its source material nor adheres too slavishly…
Australian director Ray Lawrence (best known here for the quirky 1985 comedy Bliss) provides some high-toned soap opera nicely flavored with a touch of suspense and some well-timed jolts of humor. Playwright Andrew Bovell’s busy, busy screenplay is crammed with philandering police detectives, grief-stricken psychoanalysts, traumatized gay men, gloomy husbands…
Miguel Piñero was poet, playwright and actor–and thief, liar and junkie. He was in Sing Sing by his early 20s, the iconic leader of New York’s Puerto Rican artistic movement by 30, a dead junkie by 40; yet the causes for Piñero’s life trajectory remain largely unanswerable. Leon Ichaso’s new…
Tricky thing, children’s theater. It must capture the attention of little ‘uns whose attention spans are damaged by hours of Gameboys and Power Puff Girls and at the same time entertain grown-ups reluctant to turn off their cell phones for the sake of a cultural outing with the kiddos. African…
Author and radio host Sarah Vowell has been accused of being smart and a smart-ass, a curmudgeon hiding behind a pen, a radio mike and a sweet face. But, despite her often-sarcastic tone, people who hear or read her work don’t just like it. They like her. She’s the friend…
Twyla Tharp is neither excited nor exhausted, she says, as she prepares to bring her rebirthed Twyla Tharp Dance to dance-legend-starved Dallas in the middle of a 25-city international tour. “I’m pleased with the dancers and pleased that audiences are responding,” Tharp says without much enthusiasm, calling to mind her…
Just in time to take our tired minds off the twin terrors of Osama and Enron comes The Mothman Prophecies, an enjoyable, if utterly stupid, upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre. (That is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events.) The fashionable sheen is…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit on U.S. shores right as…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
Call me conventional, call me coarse, call me crazy, but I prefer my drama, oh, I don’t know, dramatic. Give me a plot with a narrative structure that makes me eager to discover what happens next. Give me characters that are as clever as they are round, who search for…
Imagine this: Actors perform a comic space opera that spans the galaxies, featuring a lone hero battling futuristic evil threatening to undo the galaxy. There are no blue-screen or computer-generated special effects. In fact, apart from cobbled-together sound effects, there are no special effects. There’s just you and the actors…
Julia Roberts has been called the most powerful woman in Hollywood, one of the greatest actors of our time and America’s Sweetheart. Her power is evident: She can make mediocre movies like The Mexican have good openings, she can give a silly speech at the Oscars and look “sincere” and…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
