Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but–unlike with the western–every decade or so the Brits come up with…
Like countless European-American filmmakers before him, African-American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s not…
Ever since man has been able to commit images onto moving pictures he’s been imaging what it’s like to leave the earth behind for heavenly bodies or galaxies far, far away. Georges Méliès sent a group of adventurers on le voyage dans la lune back in 1902, and though the…
This much I learned from watching an advance tape of TNT’s All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson, which airs Independence Day (and I am declaring my independence from all-star tributes): Ricky Martin performs in a heretofore unknown key, Q flat. Either Elton John can’t remember the words to “Wouldn’t It Be…
Dallas gets its share of celebrity sightings, but the few-and-far-between-ness of them makes even B-grade celebrities seem fresh and exciting. Our favorite entries in the brush-with-greatness category are getting dirty looks from Jason Bateman (rumored to be a lousy tipper by local waitresses) when Necessary Roughness was filmed in Denton…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
Now here’s a tricky one. Start with a busload of familiar and appealing stars, shacked up together for a couple of weeks in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Assign them their mission: to emulate themselves–sort of–while dutifully reminding us that human relationships can be complicated. Then set the tone…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete–that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete–whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoofbeats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the blood of any self-respecting moviegoer…
After winning five Audience Awards and other honors at various gay and lesbian film festivals during the past year, Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden has finally opened in general release. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of gay cinema to see why–or even to be gay to…
If you don’t think too hard about Eighteen, the centerpiece production of Kitchen Dog Theater’s 2001 New Works Festival, this small, concentrated domestic drama will give you the kind of chills normally inspired by supernatural yarns. There’s not a drop of ectoplasm to be found in native Texan and Southern…
It’s summertime, and the living is easy–so easy, in fact, that I’ve given myself an assignment. Sooner or later, every bona fide art critic has to tackle the 800-pound intellectual gorilla of modern art, and so my poolside reading consists of the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg’s collected essays and…
No movie playing at Q Cinema, Fort Worth’s annual gay and lesbian film festival, is more emblematic of the state of homo social evolution than opening night’s All Over the Guy. Writer Dan Bucatinsky and director Julie Davis’ comedy shows how two budding romances–one gay, one straight–are intertwined and aggravated…
Spring officially ends Thursday, which means there will be a quick transition from when the sun leaves a pleasant feeling on the shoulders to when its oppressive waves sear them brick red. For the next few months, indoors is the place to be, but staring at the same four walls…
For the next five days, Richard Lewis will seldom leave his North Dallas hotel room, hidden away at the far end of the top floor with a view of overpasses, office buildings and distant dark clouds. He will venture out only to visit a couple of radio and television stations,…
When he was younger, Keith Foster regarded it as “not very cool,” which, at least in my estimation, was a kind analysis. There’s something offensive about golf–mostly rich white men parading around beautiful but misappropriated land with the arrogance of conquering war heroes, for starters–something unpalatable that’s never endeared me…
In a year inundated with massive movies, it’s a pleasant surprise to note that a truly spectacular adventure has arrived in the form of a Disney cartoon called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Gushing aside, let us now consider the Atlanteans, the mythic race whom co-directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise…
The crimes Hollywood has committed against the major Russian novelists would themselves fill a pretty hefty tome. While reducing giants such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak to lavish costuming and snappy dialogue over the years, the studio moguls also made some eccentric casting choices–for instance, cover boy George Hamilton as…
Flaminio La Scala’s 1611 collection of standard Italian comic theatrical setups, Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte, features this introduction to a night of improvised performances: Let’s say there are two old men in Florence who are bitter enemies. The son of one falls in love with the daughter of the…
During the pre-production of Lolita, enigmatic director Stanley Kubrick made an extremely rare print appearance in the Winter 1960-’61 edition of Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s cinema journal. Kubrick had come under fire in the country he left behind, America, as well as his adopted homeland of England…
Answer these riddles and pass may you to the next level of sci-fi enlightenment and unlock the secrets contained within this sidebar. Who, my young padawan, are Mara Jade and Nien Numb? “Easy,” you say, “Mara Jade is the Star Wars character who first appeared in the trilogy offshoot book…
It has become exhausting, if not incapacitating, trying to explain to non-believers (and, um, 15-year-olds) why a man in his 30s still reads comic books–like it’s something to be ashamed of, the mark of the stunted and stupid and stinky. And what, exactly, are you reading today? Something Oprah recommended?…
When he was in his 30s, Ivan Reitman made comedies like a young man. His early movies, among them Stripes and Meatballs and Ghostbusters, were messy, cocky, charming, daffy and restless; they did anything for a laugh, even if that meant dousing John Candy in mud or Bill Murray in…
