The most remarkable thing about Bart Weiss, founder and director of the Dallas Video Festival, is not his patience or taste but his empathy for filmmakers and audiences alike. He knows there will be plenty of films, both short and long, screening in the 15th Annual Dallas Video Festival that…
In those old mummy movies from the 1930s, nobody could outrun the corpse. The angry and very dead 3,000-year-old pharaoh in The Mummy and its dozens of sequels and remakes traveled with a step-drag, step-drag cadence that couldn’t outpace a three-legged sloth, but somehow the creature always caught up with…
It’s cliché: Women at midlife suffer hot flashes; men at midlife buy hot cars. So what happens to a 53-year-old butch lesbian grandmother entering menopause? In playwright Peggy Shaw’s case, she puts on a double-breasted suit and suspenders, passes for a 35-year-old man and lets loose the tiger within. The…
Outside the Dallas Museum of Natural History is the Leonhardt Lagoon, a nice little pool intended to preserve a small ecosystem, a little part of the Texas habitat. Therefore small animals such as ducks, turtles, insects and grackles (as if they needed any help) have a small plot set aside…
Kick a boy enough times, and he’ll become a man. The question is, of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero, Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids and insightful enough to engage adults, the…
Ten years after The Scandal–and its negative effect on the size of his audiences and his power and independence–Woody Allen broke his longtime avoidance of the Oscar telecast with his pro-New York stand-up shtick at this year’s ceremony. The positive audience response suggested that all is forgiven, the industry still…
Actor Arliss Howard’s debut as a director explodes with brave ambition while falling a little short, perhaps, on traditional narrative sense. So be it. If devotees of the cinematic art were willing to slide down a tunnel into John Malkovich’s head a few years back, there’s no reason to balk…
In the late ’50s, the head of a Brooklyn street gang (Stephen Dorff) must fight off attacks from a neighboring gang run by a junkie (Balthazar Getty), who is fronting for a drug dealer (Norman Reedus) fresh out of prison. At the same time, our hero’s brother (Brad Renfro) is…
Kicking around the film-fest circuit since 2000, this football film (soccer, actually, but we are in Scotland) is the quintessential sports film, complete with a ragtag team of small-timers sniffing the big time, an aging vet (Jackie McQuillan, played by feature-film newcomer Abby McCoist) seeking redemption on and off the…
There is more than a little of A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash in Tom Jericho, the hero of Michael Apted’s World War II-era romantic thriller. Both men are brilliant mathematicians, breaking military codes for the government while hovering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Nash, of course, was a…
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Imitation being the sincerest form of show business, Neil Simon simply imitated one of his own successful formulas with California Suite, the comedy now getting a fine go-round at the Richardson Theatre Centre. The premise–one hotel room, four different stories–already had worked in Plaza Suite, the 1968 Broadway hit set…
Had some wickedly funny novelist set out to satirize the excesses of contemporary art, she could do worse than to open the action at Wonder, the current show at the University of Dallas’ Haggerty Gallery. The place to start would, in fact, be with Bettie Ward’s CV, which sits at…
We competed in gymnastics as a child. We had medals, trophies, the works. But did we practice hour after hour, spraining our ankles and jamming our thumbs instead of playing Cabbage Patch and My Little Pony in order to learn about victory and defeat, experience the payoff of practice and…
For some reason we can’t quite fathom, someone once gave us a gift subscription to Southern Living, the magazine devoted to helping its readers live more elegant “Southern” lives. Maybe they were trying to tell us something. In addition to recipes for mint juleps (we drink beer) and many creative…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
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…
