William Cordova is a softhearted smart-ass who makes visual wisecracks in exquisite postcard-size paintings that can be funny, touching, and often maddeningly obscure. Scrawled graffiti, surreal bons mots, graphic design icons, expressionistic drips and blobs, scraped and weathered paint, pencil sketches, advertising slogans, and street talk collide on the small…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure florescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. But in this case, nobody’s playing games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with very…
The latest release from MTV Films, Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
thursday april 29 Miami’s historian in song Grant Livingston belts out tunes with a Florida theme tonight at one of Miami’s oldest hot spots, the Barnacle State Historic Site (3485 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove). The Barnacle isn’t a nightclub, but rather a charming little Florida vernacular-style house built in 1891…
“This is not a contest,” Abel Klainbaum says good-naturedly. As festival director of the Alliance for Media Arts’s (Anti) Film Festival, he should know. Now in its sixth year, the fest showcases the work of local, national, and (in some instances) international avant-garde and experimental filmmakers in a hodgepodge of…
Eight decades ago, while he was seeding a vision that would eventually grow into Opa-locka, developer Glenn Curtiss imagined “the most perfect city that planning and engineering could achieve, and the most beautiful that the art of man could conceive.” That dream was deferred by the hurricane of 1926 and…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. This past year it was Dark City and The Truman Show; so far this year we’ve had EDtv, The Matrix, and eXistenZ. Coming up in the next…
An appealing hybrid of fiction and documentary, The Apple joins a small group of contemporary films (1988’s The Thin Blue Line, 1992’s Brother’s Keeper) that depart from the insular universe of movies to reach out and affect the real world. It tells the story of Massoumeh and Zahra, real-life twelve-year-old…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert “Mac” MacDougal, Connery isn’t just…
If Sid Caesar had ever performed a sketch about Henry VIII, it might have resembled the hilarious second act of The King’s Mare, Oscar E. Moore’s bio-comedy about the Tudor monarch and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The entire play is now enjoying a high-spirited world premiere at Boca…
thursday april 22 With 23 musicians and seven singers, the University of Miami’s Latin big band is large enough to merit the moniker the University of Miami Salsa Orchestra. UM’s spacious Gusman Concert Hall (1314 Miller Rd., Coral Gables) thus seems an appropriate venue for their performance tonight, featuring Latin…
A day outdoors with spoiled-rotten babies, frisky pigs, and chatty birds sounds like heaven? Well, there’s a little patch of it smack dab in the middle of South Florida’s farm country at Patch O’ Heaven Petting Farm, a one-of-a-kind, hands-on animal sanctuary nestled in South Miami-Dade’s Redlands. The farm, originally…
Along with a powerful sound, drums can deliver a compelling message. Slave owners in America knew this and made sure to rid laborers of their instruments. Slave holders in Haiti were not as savvy, or slaves there were more resourceful. When brought to the island, scads of African tribes (Yoruba…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
The SLC in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional game system also…
Ariel Dorfman’s political potboiler opens like the creaky thrillers from which it’s descended — on the proverbial dark and stormy night. Paulina is alone, waiting for her husband to arrive at their desolate beach house. It’s raining. There’s no phone. A stranger enters. Well, maybe not a stranger. As Death…
It seems the entire population of South Florida now works in the entertainment industry. If not full-time, then during the off-hours from their day jobs. And every single person is making a movie. Or already has one in the can. Or plans to make one as soon as he or…
For most people the Bay of Pigs, the infamous CIA-backed attempt to oust Castro in 1961 that left close to 120 men dead (4 Americans), 60 wounded, and nearly 1200 imprisoned, is a faint blip on the radar screen of history. To artist George Sanchez it was an epic screwup…
thursday april 15 You’ve always wanted to dance professionally but you’ve never been given the chance to get onstage and strut your stuff. Maybe the reason has to do with your utter lack of grace. Yes, two left feet can be a major hindrance for those desirous of a career…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she is trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chilly dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a meadow? It is…
