During the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But, for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
The USA Film Festival, now in its 32nd year, may never again be the powerhouse fest it was at its inception–which is not to damn it, since there are several excellent offerings this year, but merely to accept a rather delightful reality. At its inception, there was no Sundance, no…
Written and directed by Bart Freundlich, this project deserves commendation for its psychological cogency and compassion, but it loses significant points for its lazy story and complacent delivery. Basically, we have a mannish boy named Cal (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) who’s a modestly successful New York architect but decides to…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Stephen Herek’s cautionary comedy about striving and satisfaction is a vain, actressy TV blonde (vain, actressy Angelina Jolie) whose driving ambition is to move up from Seattle’s inane morning news-and-talk show to a major network’s inane morning news-and-talk show. But first, a typical Hollywood curveball…
A likable British convict (James Nesbitt) plans an ingenious escape that involves cons (Lennie James, Timothy Spall, Bill Nighy), the prison’s psychologist (Olivia Williams) and the staging of Nelson!, an awful musical biography of the well-known admiral written by their dotty, musical-comedy-obsessed warden (Christopher Plummer). Complications, of course, abound, with…
Once-renowned Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara (Prince Ehtejab) had not made a picture since 1979, when his third film was banned by the post-Revolutionary Censor Board. Now, 23 years later–after moving to North America for a decade, then returning to Iran–he is back making movies. Smell of Camphor so closely mirrors…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
Some plays are timely, some plays are timeless. Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild is one of the former. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is the latter. And in productions of each, currently onstage at Kitchen Dog Theater and Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District house, respectively, the reason why timeless works better is…
Sitting at a railway crossing as the train cars cha-chunk, cha-chunk in front of our car, we tend to stare at the clock in the dash, watching the minutes slip past. But those who risk nausea and look instead at the cars might catch a glimpse of art, though they…
The only time I can recall literally rolling with laughter was during a particularly good Monty Python’s Flying Circus episode. It contained a sketch that had something to do with a giant electric penguin threatening an Arctic adventurer with octopus-like live-wire tentacles. Looking back, it seems more silly than funny;…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions. This merely bloody piece…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, The Rock, portrays The Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…
An 18th-century battle of the sexes that contains a radiant performance by Mira Sorvino as a princess whose complicated scheme to win the man she loves finds her juggling three suitors at once, all while disguised as a man. “I’m losing track of my own plot,” she giddily confesses at…
Ah, marriage. How sweet it is to discover, among all the recent wedding movies (Muriel’s, My Best Friend’s, Polish, Monsoon, etc.) that the institution’s still inspiring. Trés Greek writer and star Nia Vardalos has crafted here a worldly wise and very funny script, the better to play opposite decidedly non-Greek…
While it is surely difficult to concoct fresh, lively scenarios from worn elements (neurotic family, neurotic city, neurotic holiday), it is the filmmaker’s obligation, at the very least, to try. To her credit, veteran scribe Daniele Thompson clearly decided to take a very personal tack with her feature directorial debut,…
Arriving in theaters just ahead of a four-disc, outtakes-and-all boxed set and its Rhino Records-issued DVD companion, which comes crammed with two different commentary tracks and assorted effluvia, Martin Scorsese’s rockudrama withstands big-screen scrutiny some 24 years after its initial release. Meant to be seen large and played loud, this…
On a Friday night in March, it was hard to tell where to look: at the flickering movie screen, where The Band was wrapping up a 16-year career with a farewell concert, or at a still Robbie Robertson, who was sitting in the audience at the Paramount Theater in Austin…
Quick, quote a famous line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Don’t worry. Nobody can. Among the Bard’s works, this five-act tragedy is one of the least quotable, and it is performed less often even than Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. Probably for good reason. This hasn’t stopped the Kitchen Dog Theater…
Astronauts don’t get nervous. Like firefighters, police officers and Mariah Carey’s publicist, they exhibit unblinking courage when most mortals would cower. Such fearlessness is necessary during re-entry when a space shuttle is traveling 5 miles per second and ripping electrons in the rarefied gases above the planet, causing the plasma…
When Art Spiegelman’s Maus first appeared in 1972, it contained no references to Jews or Nazis but left no room for misinterpretation: It was a Holocaust tale, told with animals, that culminated at Mauschwitz–“which some people seem to have read as the punch line to the strip,” Spiegelman once recounted…
Women who exchange descriptions of their sexual encounters are certainly no more appealing than men who boast in locker rooms, but they seem to get more free passes. If, in the name of social candor, Jerry Springer can induce sisters to confess what they’ve done with barnyard animals and every…
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent on twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous to…
