In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported about an eleven-year-old child who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents…
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’s picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
Valentine’s Day is long gone, but the utterly charming revival of the 1963 musical She Loves Me at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables proves that romance is lasting. Certainly the story of feuding shop clerks who unwittingly fall for each other as pen pals has endured. First presented in…
thursday march 12 Subtropics 10 New Music Festival: Its different. It’s innovative. It’s that stuff you don’t hear on the radio very much, stuff you probably don’t have in your CD collection but think is incredibly cool nonetheless. We refer to experimental or new music. And the Subtropics festival is…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
“A man walks into a bar.” Stand-up comics have launched into routines with that line so often that it’s no surprise comedian-turned-movie actor Steve Martin chose the same setup to fuel the many laughs in his first effort as a playwright. In the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile,…
thursday march 5 Doral-Ryder Open: We have to admit that ever since Gerald Ford stopped missing the green and hitting the spectators with his errant drives, golf has lost a bit of its action-packed appeal. But the Doral-Ryder Open (in its 37th year, the longest-running PGA Tour event in the…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
thursday february 26 New York, New York: You may be far from New York City, but you can still help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the unification of Gotham’s boroughs by gazing at photographs up close. Classic images abound by Alfred Stieglitz, Andre Kertesz, Berenice Abbott, and others. Stieglitz, the…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of genuinely funny live-action “family” comedies (1976’s No Deposit, No Return and 1977’s Freaky Friday, among them) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s most recent film,…
The science-fiction writing of the late great Philip K. Dick hasn’t been particularly well-served on-screen. The most recent adaptation of one of his works, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall (1990) had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story on which it was based. Blade Runner…
Nothing brings theater to life like a little death. Let a doctor say someone has only a few months to live and you’ve got drama. In recent years some of the best productions have posted alarming mortality rates. Gay characters in particular have struggled through the final stages of AIDS…
thursday february 19 AfterDark Concert Series: Are you beside yourself with the thought that very soon Seinfeld will no longer keep you glued to the tube on Thursday night? Here’s an alternative: In an attempt to lure you to downtown midweek, the people at Bayfront Park (301 Biscayne Blvd.) created…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company Rolling Thunder in 1996, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. After all, Tarantino has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was that he chose to release…
This period tale of two gamblers — Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner — is too wispy to be an objet d’art and too clumsy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop known as the “Prince Rupert drop,” which can withstand a…
Having to wait for one month out of the year to buy candy hearts with cute sayings printed on them is no big deal. After all, those hard little wafers have lost much of their appeal now that they’re more likely to break my aging molars than to attract a…
thursday february 12 David Copperfield: As tempted as we are to tear into David Copperfield, he denies us the pleasure by continuing to do it himself, over and over again. The oh-so-serious illusionist is now slicing himself in half with a laser beam. Don’t, however, expect to see gallons of…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has made some of the most lively, genre-bending films of the past two decades. The guru of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back — they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-Nineties, the English company Working Title Films…
In an example of last-minute housecleaning before the February ratings sweeps began, ABC network executives pulled the plug on the cop drama Cracker. While I liked the few episodes I saw about the raffish psychologist who solves homicides, I’m glad it’s gone. One of the series’s writers, Steven Dietz, doesn’t…
