John Woo has generated plenty of American disciples in the decade since his Hong Kong action films began playing film festivals in the West. Even before he began his Hollywood career with 1993’s Hard Target, bits of his action shtick started showing up in the work of savvy young filmmakers,…
Set in 19th-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers–Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner–is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The “Prince Rupert drop” cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer, but…
Ken Hitchcock never intended to coach hockey–not at the midget level, not at the junior level, certainly not at the professional level. There’s a part of him that would have preferred to stay behind the counter of United Bicycle in his hometown of Edmonton, Canada, where he sold hockey equipment…
Tempting though it is, the stage critic will not leap into the fray of current presidential scandal to declare that Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, now being staged by Dallas Theater Center, is prophetic because it concerns a politician haunted by a misdeed he believed was long buried. The genius…
As The Apostle’s title character, E.F. “Sonny” Dewey, writer-director Robert Duvall never stops moving and never speaks in a voice lower than a roar. He runs in place, dances when standing still, hollers even when he whispers; he literally vibrates. Sonny’s a true tent-revival preacher, spitting brimstone threats and heavenly…
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
Thanks to The Grave, acclaimed at the ’96 Sundance Film Festival, and Hollywood’s need to produce new indie stars, Josh and Jonas Pate have been anointed by some as the new Coen brothers. What the Pates share with the Minnesota natives behind Fargo and Barton Fink is a good eye…
thursday january 29 The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me: Critics of the gay and lesbian community often act as if there’s a monthly conference call among all North American homosexuals to update “the gay agenda.” Many community leaders probably wish political organization were that simple; one of the biggest complaints…
Don Nelson sits in his Reunion Arena office, puffing away at a delicious, forbidden cigar. There’s no smoking in the arena, but that doesn’t stop the Dallas Mavericks coach and general manager: He simply shuts the door, opens the small humidor he keeps near his desk, cuts the end off…
A critic is always put in an awkward position when expressing dislike of any show playing at Kurt Kleinmann’s Pegasus Theatre, because the kind of broad comedy they specialize in succeeds or fails almost exclusively on the personal tastes of each audience member, not any objective appraisal of the material…
There hasn’t been a good doper movie since 1978’s Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, and even now, it reeks of yesterday’s smoke, smelling like a weedhead who hasn’t done laundry in a decade; Up in Smoke’s good for a contact high, but its buzz is gone. In 1993 Richard…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
thursday january 22 An Evening With Gary Leva: It may not be Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but then again, Grauman’s Chinese Theater ain’t what it used to be either: The AMC Glen Lakes offered Dallas native turned indie filmmaker Gary Leva a stellar reception when his first flick, Plan B, wound…
On January 6, the Dallas Mavericks ended a 15-game losing streak in front of a crowd team officials said hovered around the 9,000 mark–though, in truth, no more than half that number bothered to show up at Reunion Arena for this clash of last-place titans, the Mavs versus the Denver…
When you hear theater snobs hold forth on the civilized, specialized virtues of live performance, they often invoke that art form’s timelessness. Live performance, or at least some form of oratory before an attentive crowd, probably predates the advent of recorded history. Some form of it has appeared in virtually…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience. It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It’s about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese invasion in…
After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged onto screens in December, the studios have little left in their pipelines for January. With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of…
thursday january 15 Carl Gottlieb: Producer-director-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb has a wheelbarrow full of TV and film credits, but movie buffs will be forever grateful to him for writing the screenplay to Jaws, one of the greatest suspense movies ever made. That was when Steven Spielberg was a hungry, 27-year-old filmmaker,…
According to playwright Lee Marans, Old Wicked Songs, his searingly funny Pulitzer Prize nominee from 1996, will be the second most produced play in regional American theater this season. Theatre Three snagged the script for its Southwestern premiere and has blessed us all with a magnificently paced, poetically performed production–and…
In 1997, both the big studios and the independents got stuck in their respective sewers of cliche–conflagrations, computer graphics, and crazy comedies on the one hand; on the other, dysfunctional families, kooky proles, and drop-outs. Some of the most highly promoted and lauded films from either the big-studio or indie…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an 11-year-old boy who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
