The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme, which was nominated for eleven César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago, is yet another sign that the dropoff in French imports that has plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing. This is roughly the fifteenth…
“Last year I met the girl of my dreams at the event and we fell in love and we got married and we had three kids and we got a house and we got a dog and a new car and I got the job of a lifetime working on…
So you’ve supped at Versailles, sipped at La Carreta, salsa-ed at Café Nostalgia, shopped at Botanica la Abuela, and seen every episode of ¿Que Pasa, U.S.A.? … twice. But how much do you really know about Little Havana? This weekend South Florida history expert Paul George leads his Little Havana…
Adapted for the stage by TG Cooper, the late founder of the M Ensemble Company, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Live! is a tribute to the black comedienne who broke the color lines and paved the way for other artists. Born Loretta Mary Aiken in the 1890s, Mabley is often called the…
Le Bouchon du Grove, the little French bistro in Coconut Grove, will add to Miami’s vice Thursday evening. To celebrate this year’s harvest of the Beaujolais Nouveau, the young fruity red wine grown and fermented quickly in Southern France, they’ll host a fete that will spill out of the bottle…
Nilo Cruz’s A Park in Our House is a record of the human spirit when the human body exists in a totalitarian state and survives on a continuum not of belief but of disbelief. The romantic, the idealist, the realist, the repressed, the rebel, and the messiah — these are…
It’s obvious that Miami is a diverse city. But is it fair to say that we live in a pluralistic one? Pluralism entails independent groups developing their cultures and interests within a common community. This means people have to see themselves as part of a bigger picture. Not an easy…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
At first glance Paragraph 175, a documentary by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, doesn’t appear to be must-see moviegoing. Epstein and Friedman are well-known award-winning documentarians with a string of notable successes: The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and The Life and Times of Harvey Milk among…
“There was all sorts of giggling and exclamations and lively conversation,” recalls translator and author Suzanne Jill Levine about her first meeting with Manuel Puig in a Chinese restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village during the winter of 1969. The gay Argentine writer had just published his first two…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul–or the dumb bastard–who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz, it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montreal) isn’t the first guy to skewer what Tennessee Williams called “the bitch-goddess of success.” Or to lay bare the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Or to otherwise annihilate celebrity worship. But in his observant, swiftly paced Stardom Arcand does it…
Gopher. Explosives. Gopher … explosives. Gopher! Explosives! There. Now you know exactly what was running through this critic’s mind during The Legend of Bagger Vance, the impeccably aimed new tranquilizer dart from Hollywood’s Mr. Honeydrip, Robert Redford. Of course it’s really not fair to compare this meditative drama to that…
What gets you banned in Boston surely will get you embraced in Miami. Wait a second: These days what gets banned in Boston? Or anywhere else for that matter? A naughty little theater production courtesy of the Canada-based Caravan Stage theater company. This past summer, when they pulled their 90-foot…
Cultural memoryscapes; sophisticated movement; everyday sounds, rhythms, and speech patterns: the tools used by four challenging contemporary choreographers participating in the dance element of the Florida-Brazil arts collaboration known as FLA/BRA. Elevating the dialogue between sound and motion to a lively debate, the works offer vibrant perspectives on creativity, humanity,…
In a dingy sixth-floor room, two lonely souls join hands, seeking an escape from their solitude and isolation through the medium of dance. They shuffle across the floor, clumsily performing a waltz while chatting about their lives. If this scenario sounds as if it were penned by romance novelist Danielle…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
Art is domination. It’s making people think for one moment in time, there’s only one art, one voice, and that’s yours,” declares opera star Maria Callas (Rosemary Prinz) in Master Class. Callas was not simply a talented singer and a beautiful woman; she was a diva. It is the ability…
By force of habit, we can live in a city and come to accept the degradation of our surroundings. Urban changes take place slowly, and we may not notice them because we move around these environments as part of our daily lives. Suddenly we realize the beauty is no more…
The opening credits of Charlie’s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes; the tease is too soon rendered a disappointment. A Mission: Impossible-style prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman; a camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet, capturing…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down drag-out battle for…
