Big news: Big Daddy isn’t such a bigot after all. That’s one of several important revelations to be found in WaterTower Theatre’s breathtaking new production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the emphasis shifts away from “Maggie the Cat” and onto the other feuding family members…
John Alexander has led the most charmed of painterly lives. True, he didn’t start out that way; he was born in Beaumont, raised among swamp critters and fundamentalists and educated in the sticks (B.A. from Lamar University, M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University). His inspiration to paint probably came as he…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
For author and filmmaker Michael Moore, the old joke about having an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, each whispering commands, must be more like a daily battlefield. Except, for Moore, on one side there’s Corporate Crimefighting Chicken (his poultry-costumed crusader from his NBC series TV…
Remember back in school the excitement that surrounded getting to see a film during class? Either a projector or a television would be wheeled into the room, those dreadful fluorescent lights were turned off and suddenly we were free for 45 minutes. It would be a great day. Though it…
The two slacker anti-heroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) (And Your Mother, Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence–raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics–one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September 11, Big…
Anybody who takes a second, sorrowful look at the charred rubble in lower Manhattan, the body counts in the West Bank or the brazen denials of Slobodan Milosevic will have to conclude that the brotherhood of man isn’t attracting many good recruits these days. Neither, for that matter, is the…
When it was first shown in rough-cut form two years ago, Bruce Weber’s documentary collage dealt primarily with his latest fetish object, college wrestling champion Peter Johnson, with occasional interludes about singer Frances Faye. Greatly re-edited, the film is now primarily about Faye, a lesbian hipster whose hard-driving style and…
Maryam Armin (Mariam Parris), a beautiful 16-year-old Iranian-born transplant so out of touch with her roots she prefers to be called Mary, has goo-goo eyes for a dim-bulb blond boy and dreams of becoming a newscaster–Jessica Savitch, actually. It’s November 1979, and Mary’s cousin, college student Ali (David Ackert), has…
Nothing happens and everything happens in Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist masterpiece; it’s a stark snapshot in which all is revealed about the “daily life of mankind,” as the director once offered by way of description. Umberto Domenico Ferrari (played by Carlo Battisti, a former professor in his sole big-screen…
When in doubt, the first-timer always turns to the numbingly familiar; in this case, co-directors Charles A. Addessi and William DeMeo lift damned near every mob-movie cliché they can lay their mitts on, going so far as to directly reference The Sopranos in one dreadfully flat joke–assuming, perhaps, that by…
Back in 1982, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? played for only five performances at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre before it was shuttered as a critically panned flop. But that wasn’t the end of the show. Over the next 20 years, James Quinn and Alaric Jans’ lighthearted musical about…
For all of Dallas’ benefits (Southwestern-style urban sprawl, for example), it can be confusing at times and often more than a little stressful. For many people, the day begins and ends on Central Expressway, Interstate 30 or Stemmons Freeway, and the abundance of tension experienced along these thoroughfares is matched…
They never lie and say “it’s not about the money.” They never pull a Randy Moss and dog it off the line of scrimmage. They don’t spit in umpires’ faces, though they’ve been known to drool on folks. And if they fail a drug test, they can honestly say it…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teen-age daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, dyspeptic director David Fincher reveals himself as little more than a derivative visionary. For some, this will be enough: As mainstream, studio-financed movies…
Writer-director Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo takes its basic hook from the Native American myth of the Windigo, as it’s more frequently spelled. (You say Wendigo, I say Windigo–let’s call the whole thing off.) In its classic form, the Windigo is an evil spirit that possesses humans in the grip of hunger…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made…about a singing vegan in a fuchsia…
The Asian Film Festival, taking place this weekend, features a dozen exotic entries, only a few of which have ever screened locally; the range is impressive, from Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Seven Samurai to John Woo’s The Killer to Kinji Fukusaku’s, ahem, banned-in-the-U.S. Battle Royale from last year. There’s also…
This film is loosely based, without credit, on H.G. Wells’ short story “The New Accelerator,” in which a scientist figures out a way to slow time down to such an extent that everything else moves in super slo-mo; in essence, he’s moving so fast that to the rest of the…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
Rock Baptist of Houston, setting for David Rambo’s trenchant comedy God’s Man in Texas now at Theatre Three, isn’t so much a place of worship as a stained-glassed theme park. Inside the fictional “largest Baptist church in the world” are restaurants, snack bars, a bowling alley and gym, dinner theater,…
