On the surface, Oscar-nominated A Prophet is a French prison drama. Malik is a young man of Arab descent who can’t read or write. He finds himself in jail and must navigate the power hierarchies of his cellmates. Malik undergoes a metamorphosis, surviving an Oz-like hazing and developing his own…

It was in NYC’s Katz’s Deli that Meg Ryan faked her orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. But hundreds of New York snowbirds were in their own state of bliss in Miami Beach’s Rascal House, which served Jewish comfort food ever since Wolfie Cohen opened it in 1954. It closed…

Guantánamo is a real black mark on the United States. Consider its long list of atrocities: inhumane conditions, psychological and physical torture, and imprisonment without trial. In the words of Liz Lemon: Shut it down. Much of the push to close it has had to do with the detainees in…

Great dance performances are like celebrity deaths; they happen in threes. At least they are this Friday, when you’ll have to choose among the skillful moves of three distinct dance companies. Topping off this dance performance sandwich is Ölelés, where two men from Barcelona’s Alta Realitat company execute what’s been…

Great dance performances are like celebrity deaths; they happen in threes. At least they are this Friday, when you’ll have to choose among the skillful moves of three distinct dance companies. Perhaps the traditional art of ballet is your thing. The Miami City Ballet is closing its 24th season with…

Great dance performances are like celebrity deaths; they happen in threes. At least they are this Friday, when you’ll have to choose among the skillful moves of three distinct dance companies. The Miami Dance Festival 2010 begins with Ori, choreography that reflects the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, performed by Miami-based…

Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes makes pop music out of guitars, synths, and anxiety. There’s no better example of his melodramatic tendencies than “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal,” a track off the band’s 2007 Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, which catalogs his marital troubles. It’s an intoxicating 12-minute descent…

With all the shock art and torture porn making the rounds in local galleries, an exhibition of Bauhaus-informed color experimentation will have a hard time pulling in crowds. But we’re already anticipating the twee, art-school backlash that will bring us back to the fundamentals of shapes and that colorful character…

Thanks to Marion Manley, our pre-1945 houses were literal iceboxes this past winter. With cold tile floors and rooms built for cross ventilation, they were clearly built for a place where the mercury rarely dips below 45 degrees. Miami’s first female architect, Manley designed houses in Morningside, Coral Gables, and…

The old-timey tradition of having some guy play the piano while moving pictures dance on the wall is something that goes all the way back to the Lumière brothers’ earliest experiments. Unfortunately, the whole live music movie scene pretty much died in 1927 when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer…

Say Florida broke off from the rest of the country. (The planet has already tipped off of its axis, so it’s not unthinkable that another quake just might break us free.) Now let’s imagine we had to survive on the spoils of this state alone. Every day would be one…

You wouldn’t expect an exhibition put on by college students to be this cool. But “Aesthetics and Values 2010,” the annual exhibit curated by FIU’s Honors College students, shows exceptional vision — both by the students choosing the artists and the artists themselves. The signature piece is Wendy Wischer’s Incandescence,…

There are only so many photos you can take of your cat Minksy and still call yourself a photographer and not just a feline fancier. What you need is a challenge of reality-TV-like proportions. This Sunday, sign up for Photomarathon, a photo contest organized by the nonprofit Fotomission and Tropicolor…

Items you can purchase in Lang Lang’s online store: a Steinway piano, a silk scarf with a piano pattern, and black Adidas sneakers with gold stripes. Who’s Lang Lang? He’s a child prodigy Chinese pianist. Now 27 years old, he has played for kings and queens, helped score Hollywood films…

These days, we’d be lucky if we could afford to see a soap opera on network TV, let alone an opera at the Arsht Center. But thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation, even the unemployed now have a chance to see fat ladies sing. Florida Grand Opera is…