There’s an old show-business maxim that as soon as you stop chasing your big break, it chases you. Such is the dilemma faced by Lena Machado, the titular character in Lena’s Dreams, an edgy independent feature from the writing/directing team of Heather Johnson and Gordon Eriksen. Set in the gritty…
What if fate has something horrific in store for you, and you can’t escape it? It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, from Greek myths like Oedipus Rex, to the New Testament, to EC Comics and The Twilight Zone. Cinematically we tend to prefer the idea that…
Paola di Florio’s documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of…
People strolling down Miami Beach this weekend will have something more interesting to look at than hard bodies working on their tans and old fogies milling about with metal detectors. Planted in the sands along 21st Street, sprawling across an area roughly the size of a football field, will be…
Everyone sits in the dark and watches movies. Few of us really listen to them, that is, listen to the music that accompanies those often-indelible images. But would we be laughing, crying, gasping at the appropriate moments if all we heard was dialogue? Of course not. The subtle form of…
Critics die. Audiences are reincarnated. The only true test of a work of art’s value is its timelessness, and perhaps its timeliness. Timelessness is the ability of drama to say something about the human condition in a way that penetrates generation after generation of audiences. Timeliness is the director’s (in…
The Paseos Shopping and Entertainment center is a semiabandoned structure on Coral Way, two blocks east of Coral Gables. On the third level (next to Bally’s Total Fitness) is Miami ArtWorks, a hybrid studio space, art school, gallery, and museum shop. Paintings of different sizes and styles, ceramics, metal statues,…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is being reissued in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not by much) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be as volatile as the…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and following a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
As cities go, Miami Beach gets around. At least around the world. Our sparkling burg on the Atlantic counts Santa Marta, Colombia; Cozumel, Mexico; Pescara, Italy; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Fujisawa, Japan among its ten or so sister cities. A nationwide program encompassing more than 1000 cities in the…
Against the walls of sculptor Rafael Consuegra’s studio, the archangel Gabriel rests in pieces. When soldered together the stainless-steel seraph will stand nearly 36 feet high. Holding a trumpet aloft, this messenger from a vengeful Heaven threatens to usher in the apocalypse. Instead Consuegra’s creation will welcome visitors to this…
Back in its heyday during the Forties and Fifties, the stretch of NW Second Avenue from about Sixth to Fourteenth Street in Overtown where the Lyric Theater sits was a nightlife hub known as Little Broadway. Several black-owned hotels and clubs thrived there, as did the intimate Lyric, a 400-seat…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, Was Madonna always this bad an actress? It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor? and, Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director? Since the…
Willie Morris’s autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
The Cup takes place in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in Bhutan, where the head abbot (Lama Chonjor) is curious, though not the least bit ruffled, to discover that some of his monks are secretly sneaking off to a nearby town to watch World Cup matches on television. Not surprisingly the abbot…
Think Pretty Woman meets The Monica Lewinsky Story and you’ve got A Girl Called Rosemarie. Based on Germany’s biggest political scandal of the 1950s, Bernd Eichinger’s film (originally a miniseries for German TV) follows Rosemarie (Nina Hoss), an orphan who learned at an early age that sex gives her power…
Be honest. If someone told you ahead of time that you were going to see a play that depicts the coming-of-age of a young black girl somewhere in the South during the mid-Sixties, you might want to respond, “What a shame! I have a root canal to attend to.” Or,…
There was a time when a young man with a dream in his heart and a guitar in his hand had to go to the City of Angels to make it as a rock and roll star. That was then. This is now. In the past decade, the Latin divisions…
After a light lead with Bossa Nova, this week the FIU Miami Film Festival comes to an end on a heavier note with the French screen version of Stalin’s world, East-West. The big French offering in this second half is Battle Cries, the story of a pregnant woman with breast…
It’s highly unlikely members of the Miami Beach Garden Conservancy would be caught dining on hearts of palm. They’re more likely to be found nurturing palm trees than devouring their guts at dinner. The conservancy, a nonprofit advocacy group, was founded by eight members in 1997. Its mission: to restore…
“I really needed to pull in some professionals and go for broke and see what happens, just push the envelope, because people weren’t taking me seriously,” says Karen Stewart, professor and director of dance at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, and founder of the nine-year-old Black Door Dance Ensemble. “We…
As heir to the ideological battles of the late Nineteenth Century, the avant-gardists hoped to make art sovereign by ridding it of the evils of capitalist consumerism. Once outside those laws, art truly would liberate mankind, just as Schiller had exhorted in his letters, On the Aesthetic Education of Man…
