Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best-known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films, Gates of Heaven…
thursday november 20 Rose’s Rock On Anniversary IV: Everything is new at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge — stage, sound system, lighting, decor, lower drink prices, cover charge — except for one thing: Rose’s itself. On fickle South Beach for four years, the club provides a rare forum for local,…
thursday november 13 New Vision Florida/Brazil Festival: Bringing together artists from Brazil and Florida, the festival ends this weekend with two dance concerts at Miami Beach’s Colony Theater and outdoor street performances on Lincoln Road. A highlight occurs tonight at 9:00 when Brazilian guitar virtuoso Baden Powell performs solo, in…
This final dispatch from the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival begins with a pair of French imports, the first of which, Pour Rire! (translated as Just for Laughs), could have been nicely paired with last week’s Love, Etc. on a double bill titled “What Is This Thing Called Love?” In…
When you can’t figure out which direction the stock market will head or which nation isn’t complying with nuclear disarmament, it’s soothing to know that at least somewhere on the television dial things remain constant: Mary Richards will never find Mr. Right, Lucy Ricardo won’t headline at Ricky’s club, and…
Info: Calendar for the week By Larry Boytano, Judy Cantor, Nina Korman, and Jennifer Osorio thursday november 6 House of Blues Tour: The blues comes to Broward in a big way tonight at 8:00 and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. when the House of Blues presents Dr. John, Charlie Musselwhite, and…
Continuing my rambles through the world’s longest-ever film festival, I couldn’t resist a peek at a tiny bit of the glitz that seems to be almost as important to these enterprises as the films themselves. I attended the opening night of the Boca Mini-Fest at a posh mall, Mizner Park…
To borrow a line from the great soul singer Sam Cooke, I don’t know much about history, but I do know that Benedict Arnold turned traitor during the Revolutionary War. In the world premiere of Benedict Arnold, now at Palm Beach’s Florida Stage (formerly the Pope Theatre Company), playwright William…
thursday october 30 Naomi Wolf: Naomi Wolf sure knows how to piss people off. A controversial figure among the feminist elite, she discusses her latest book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, today at 10:30 a.m. as part of the Jewish Book Fair’s Women’s Day Luncheon. A Rhodes Scholar and…
Once more unto the breach: It’s film festival time yet again! But this one promises to be a Biggie; in fact, it’s being hyped as one of the world’s Ten Best, and definitely the longest. What are we talking about? Our own Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, of course, scheduled…
Some plays transport you back through time by parading actresses in hoop skirts across the stage or bathing the scenery in the simulated flicker of gas lamps, but Clarence Darrow, now at Coral Gables’s New Theatre, accomplishes the feat by presenting nothing more than ideas. Based on the life of…
thursday october 23 Writers Harvest National Reading: Like a good book? Like it even better when the author reads it to you? Then you’ll love this. Tonight is Writers Harvest, the nation’s largest literary benefit. At 600 bookstores nationwide, 2000 of your favorite authors read from their works simultaneously. Attend…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that occasionally imagination is all he has…
The true-life story of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it has never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, two films have suddenly appeared, on the 80th anniversary of the purported sighting of these ethereal creatures. Photographing…
During the intermission of Private Lives, being staged by downtown Miami’s Ramsay-Hutchison Players, a dance professor from the New World School of the Arts asked me if I review college theater. I said no and went on to explain that I am reluctant to write in-depth reviews of performances by…
thursday october 16 Guitar Greats: The rock guitar pantheon brings its traveling exhibition of flying fret virtuosity to the Sunrise Musical Theater (5555 95th Ave., Sunrise) for a four-hour rock and blues bash. The promoters of the G-3 Tour, whose uninspired title presumably translates into “three guitarists,” need to check…
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…
