The bloodletting begins even before the opening credits: A wild-eyed, butcher-knife-wielding man hovers menacingly over a full-figure girl immersed in a bubble bath. Suddenly he plunges in for the kill, first gouging out her left eye, next hacking off her left leg, and then carefully packing the viscous body parts…
A café in Mexico City where artists, writers, and political radicals gathered in the early 1900s, Café Tacuba also is the name of a band as committed to preserving Mexican history and culture as it is to turning the common places of its homeland upside down. “It’s a game that…
“I’m not the celebrity type,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, and he does not lie. His is a household name in very few neighborhoods; it appears in film credits buried just beneath those of actors more famous, or just luckier. Rare is the filmgoer who utters the words, “Dude, let’s go check…
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. — Stevie Smith In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (played by Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of…
Since the beginning of modern times, artists have embraced art as a vehicle for social change. Modern art often has been used as an instrument of critique against the injustices of the status quo. Yet it also can be a valuable commodity to the same establishment art seeks to fight…
This just in: Religious fundamentalism can be oppressive to women! That’s the less than startling message in the Israeli film Kadosh, which manages to draw out its obvious point for nearly three hours of monotony. Despite some solid performances and lovely visuals, Amos Gitai’s latest effort can’t overcome its static,…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can drive you in in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact for the first half-hour or…
I have never read The Odyssey, A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, the Bible. But I have read, from cover to cover, Occupation: Skateboarder, the just-published autobiography from Tony Hawk. I have never seen most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, or…
It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights U.S. settlers fought for after freedom of speech, was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and Clyde rampage…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes its cue from the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or of…
Dolphins are the “creatures we might have been if we had lived in the sea,” declares soft-spoken narrator Pierce Brosnan in the IMAX film Dolphins. The movie explores the mystique of these feisty, flirty, gregarious, intelligent, and mysterious mammals, of which there are 40 species. And they are the stars…
Zoom along Southwest 66th Street off 99th Avenue too quickly in your car and Palm Hammock Orchid Estate just may elude you. Slow down, though, look carefully, and you’ll be astonished to find the lushly landscaped nursery. Plunked down in 1973 on the site of a once-agricultural area, the Estate…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form onstage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and fertile…
The issue of Latin-American art — what it is and if our city is a center for it — comes up in Miami art circles almost daily. For many artists Miami, for better or worse, feels like a Latin-American city within the United States. Language and cultural ties make this…
If there ever was a hell created just for intellectuals, it would surely be Miami in July and August. The heat is relentless, the beaches shimmer, the traffic on the 836 is gelatinous, and the prettiest people tend to wear the least clothing in the most distracting places. In the…
Imagine being given a do-over, a free pass to correct yesterday’s mistakes and missteps. Perhaps you’d choose a different job, a different lover, a different life; perhaps you’d reinvent yourself altogether, since you have the gift of hindsight. You know where you went wrong last time; tomorrow, that magical new…
In a perfect world, any documentary about televangelists narrated by RuPaul and a couple of sock puppets would be hailed as the unquestionable conceptual masterpiece of the year. Alas, those stodgy Academy voters just don’t understand cross-dressers, religious broadcasting, or foot-warmers made to look like dogs. And so the best…
Everyone is important but everyone may not be indispensable. That’s what Here We Are Waiting for You clearly imparts on a melancholy journey through the Twentieth Century that focuses on its most and least transcendental people. The film follows their lives and their roles in history as a matter of…
Miami a hip fashion center? New York, Paris, Milan, and London definitely, but our capital of sun and fun has been known over the years for little more than sun and fun. Sure emaciated human hangers have been turning heads on South Beach for the last decade or so, but…
