Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
April 1999 was the last time a public peep was heard from George Sanchez — or maybe it was more like a squeal. That year the artist, who likes making big statements, mounted “monumento,” an installation commemorating the 38th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Housed in the…
Hey, watch out! Oops! Ever get a lesson in perception — the hard way? If so, you know things aren’t always as they seem, objects in the mirror are sometimes closer than they appear, and you can’t always trust your eyes — all information that should enhance your appreciation of…
This is a busy time of the year, so let’s get to the point of this review fast. If you want to see a classic example of sitcom at its silliest, get over to Ray Cooney’s Caught in the Net at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. No, that’s not a sneer;…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
It took Andre Dubus all of eighteen pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-hours-plus In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’s short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
Appropriately A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people, and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
Recent hot days of December have made Miamians moan, groan, and long for a big blast of Arctic air so they can don the moth-balled sweaters and coats hidden deep in their closets. Warm-weather lovers are crying wool! So it seems impossible to fathom that winter officially arrives Friday, December…
The hills were alive with The Sound of Music in 1965. Since 1999 the halls have been alive with the sound of Sing-a-Long Sound of Music. The final musical collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma, South Pacific) began its life on Broadway in 1959 and starred Mary…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded — and then just as easily dismissed — as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn…
“Enter at your own risk,” warns interior decorator, furniture designer, and photography curator Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque about the Design District space where he’ll show the work of controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Like many people in this unsure post-9/11 world, Arcila-Duque has scaled down recently, shuttering his large furniture showroom…
She came, she saw, she mamboed. In the middle of the Dezerland’s near-vacant lounge, two women stand tentatively behind professional dancer and instructor Jami Josephson. A few hotel guests banter at the bar. Sheathed in matching gun-metal- gray velour top and pants, with nails as dark and glossy as a…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
Photography is a great medium for social documentation. Think of nineteenth-century French photographer Eugène Atget, who produced thousands of photographs of Paris with direct, novel, and poetic renditions of everything imaginable: people in the streets, shop fronts, buildings, wheeled vehicles of all kinds, decorative details, et cetera. Cuban photo documentaries…
“What we have is a hard core of revolutionaries that have infiltrated half the Hollywood guild…. Hollywood is everywhere. Every small town in the country has got a moviehouse. We’re talking the hearts and the minds of a nation.” Thus warns a zealous FBI agent in Welsh director Karl Francis’s…
The lights go down and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So … wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious…
Some movies you see because you want to. Others you see because you have to. For anyone who is interested in film noir, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1955) is one of the latter. Just as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is credited with starting the genre in the…
Watching Ann-Margret shimmy so energetically next to Elvis in kitschy movies such as Viva Las Vegas or stab people and set fire to things as an angry delinquent in 1964’s campy Kitten with a Whip so long ago, it’s hard to imagine her a senior citizen. Nevertheless the actress turned…
In the curious, peculiar little world of theater, there has always been and always will be an ongoing debate between the aficionados of art and those of entertainment. Aesthetes tend to roll their eyes at anything corny, sweet, or obvious, while fun-loving fans head for the door at the first…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
