If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another–growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually in a…
Naked emotion is a tricky thing to sell, especially in semiautobiographical films about confused mama’s boys gradually learning that life exists beyond the control of their lens. The latter two of this cut’s three hours richly expand upon the romantic longing (for Agnese Nano young, Brigitte Fossey older) and deliver…
This thoughtful and somewhat languid adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play finds its beauty in the heady performance of Charlotte Rampling as Lyubov, childlike matriarch of a fast-fading period of social polarity. Returning from a long-term Paris retreat to her Russian estate and its complex web of disparate characters, not…
The challenge faced here by writer-director Robert Guédiguian (Charge!) is to keep his cheap melodrama from curdling his insightful societal appraisal. Michèle (Ariane Ascaride) is a dutiful young grandmother in Marseille, working nights packing fish to support her useless husband, Claude (Pierre Banderet), her junkie-prostitute daughter Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier) and…
Somewhere outside the Magic Kingdom, there are bored people. Blissfully unaware of the suits who design the multiplex fodder they’ll be mentally munching, these people discover a movie about a pug-nosed and pugnacious little Hawaiian girl bearing the boy’s name of Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) and her barely adult…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
Small-town life gets a brutal but hilarious going-over in Sordid Lives, Del Hughes’ comedy playing at the Trinity River Arts Center. Make that small-town Texas life. The kind of small Texas town where men have big bellies, women have big hair and everybody has a big mouth. This is the…
You’re at a poetry reading. The emcee strolls to the center of a set adorned with a long couch, a table, a lamp and other cozy home accoutrements. “Welcome to my living room. You’re just a fly on the wall,” she says. A young, guitar case-toting musician wearing baggy blue…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward: It is bereft of twists (instead, we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that to entertain it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
We’ve only ourselves to blame. Our love for, if not obsession with, the detritus of popular culture has led us here–once more, into a theater screening a multimillion-dollar adaptation of a cartoon that always looked like it cost $4.93 to manufacture. (Of the cartoons proffered by William Hanna and Joseph…
The humidity outside, and even inside the Adolphus Hotel’s hallways, is stifling, but Nic Cage doesn’t sweat it–even in a leather jacket (with requisite fringes), black boots (wrapped in silver chains) and dark jeans, which makes one think he’s still Wild at Heart. He’s dolled up junket-style, playing mean and…
The swaggering neo-Nazi skinhead played here to scary effect by Ryan Gosling takes equal delight in punching out a frightened Talmudic scholar and justifying fascism with his articulate verbal harangues. But something distinguishes him from Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper and Edward Norton in American History X. Gosling’s Daniel Balint…
Sold as a romantic comedy about a 31-year-old grad student unable to find (or unwilling to choose) a bride, Dover Koshashvili’s second feature is hardly madcap or even touching. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) is no Bachelor being chased down the street by a mob of would-be brides. He’s merely torn–between his…
“Circuit parties,” the massive days-long gay events held periodically in major cities and fashionable resort towns nationwide, are a subject ripe for movie treatment, and Dirk Shafer’s film does a good job of capturing this scene, particularly its destructive side. While dance parties are supposedly celebratory events, “circuit” affairs are…
This is the kind of film Robert Forster starred in before his career was resurrected by Quentin Tarantino and Jackie Brown; it’s direct-to-video, by way of Starz! Forster stars as Eddie Miller, a traveling diamond salesman on his way out after a heart attack renders him uninsurable. He stays on…
Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal–the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some…
In only 70 minutes, Barbette, the new play from Kitchen Dog Theater, achieves what too few other stage works ever do: It makes art. That it manages to make art happen so quietly and with so much heart is a special, precious gift to its audience. Based on the life…
As with any earthly endeavor, museum-going is governed by certain immutable, objectively verifiable laws. Laws like Biederman’s Razor: The worse the institution, the greater its penchant for puffery. Fortunately, there is a corollary to this axiom. While far too many major museums put a postmodern faith into spin, quality shows…
While recently shopping at the Lush Cosmetics Store, I was bombarded by full-on sensory stimulation. The textured soaps and bath balls and the creamy lotions and potions looked and smelled so divine, I wished I could eat them. (Which reminds me of one unfortunate day when I mistakenly did. I…
Lewis MacAdams called the other day, and he began the conversation as though the person on the other end of the line had no idea who he is. “My old friend Angus Wynne said I should call,” he began, before proffering a brief bio: born in San Angelo, raised in…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers–a montage of Monument Valley–instantly invokes memories of the opening of John Woo’s immediately previous film, Mission: Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a World War II epic…
