Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lighted luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest, and weakest, roles (in A Thousand Acres) with a far more challenging, and formidable, performance in Washington Square, the new film version of Henry James’s 1880 novel chronicling the courtship of a wealthy girl with no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all — rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over…
Forty years after his playwriting debut, Harold Pinter ranks in the top five of living drama scribes in at least two categories: most acclaimed and least understood. His works delight academics, who find existential metaphors for the Atomic Age in his characters’ random actions and disjointed dialogue. Those very same…
thursday october 9 Celluloid Vampires: This lecture sucks — blood, that is. With Halloween just around the corner, the Wolfsonian (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) has gotten a bit ghoulish and invited a professor (no, not Van Helsing, Dracula’s nemesis) to talk about vampire films tonight at 6:30. Bill Rothman,…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. The film’s an epic about how…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Going All the Way, the 1970 best seller by South Beach resident and FIU writing professor Dan Wakefield, is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last…
Despite the weekend’s steady rain, more than 50 people join me as I wade into the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre on a recent Sunday night. After reaching into soaked pockets and purchasing five-dollar tickets, we quickly fill up the rows of the tiny storefront playhouse. The view from our seats, however,…
thursday october 2 Maluala: Oh, what a paradise the Cuba of yore seemed. Except for one thing (no, not Castro): slavery. Yes, Cuba was not always so libre; plenty of Africans were oppressed there too. Regarded by some as the father of black Cuban cinema, Sergio Giral, now a resident…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir U-Turn is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Yet, try as it might to cast “America’s favorite anti-star” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this film is a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which, in…
Living up to his reputation as a consummate gentleman, Bill Hindman asks for permission to loosen his tie as he settles into our booth at a little out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant near Dadeland. I find it amazing he is even wearing a tie during this break from his preparations to portray…
“Those, like poets, who have not distanced themselves from their childhood will remember that as children they believed that animals thought and behaved like men,” wrote the late Afro-Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera in her book Animals in the Folklore and Magic of Cuba. “In the inner world of childhood, insects,…
When High Button Shoes premiered on Broadway in 1947, its name and 1913 setting conjured nostalgic images of more carefree days. Its title still brings to mind visions of a bygone era, and one yearns for the golden age of musical comedy when boy wooed girl through exhilarating dance numbers…
thursday september 25 The Castro: Castro in Miami? Who could have imagined? Well, not that Castro. This Castro is the neighborhood in San Francisco — once a serene working-class enclave, now a bastion of gay liberation and the subject of a documentary, which will receive its East Coast premiere at…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair (most raps are), but there’s no question…
This summer Air Force One kicked off the post-Cold War thriller derby. The Peacemaker, the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, picks up the hot potato and carries it another nine yards. Once again we’re watching thickly accented Russians bemoaning the…
thursday september 18 Paul George Gallery Walk: He’s baaaack. Miami’s tireless homeboy historian Paul George is renowned in and out of town for his lively, informative tours about the people and places that make this such a weird and wonderful place to live. The professor celebrates ten years of exploration…
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official, and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship…
Every film adaption of an existing work has its own unique set of problems. In the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
The Fifties-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is…
In their zeal to make sense of new and ever-evolving genres, rock critics are always quick to hold high a familiar sound from the past as the forerunner to and “seminal” influence on whatever is happening in the present. But Arkology (Island Jamaica/Chronicles), the new collection of reggae rarities produced…
