Governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porter-ized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic or a blinkered snoot — maybe both — to persist in such a demonstration…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine Isabel Archer (Nicole…
Comedian Rob Becker, creator and star of Defending the Caveman, the longest running nonmusical solo show in the history of Broadway, has a little secret. He discovered it during the first year of his marriage and he let me in on it during a recent telephone interview from New York…
Parking is invariably scarce on Ponce de Leon Boulevard and the neighboring streets on the first Friday of the month. Perfume and cigar smoke cloud the air, and Coral Gables’s finest are out in force. In terms of numbers, the Coral Gables Gallery Walk, now in its fifth year, is…
thursday january 9 Festival of Chefs: Lick your lips and indulge your appetite when twenty chefs from some of South Florida’s finest restaurants cross spatulas tonight at 6:00 p.m. at the Sky Lobby of International Place (100 SE Second St.) to benefit the Easter Seal Society. A media-celebrity panel –…
The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The embodiment of the American Dream is a pornographer who admits to losing his virginity at age eleven to a chicken and is known for saying things such as “A woman’s vagina has as much personality…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (recent example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first…
Dry as a martini, smooth as a smoking jacket, pointed as the end of a cigarette holder — Noël Coward’s wit has been synonymous with jaded sophistication for almost three-quarters of a century. Personally and professionally, the Master, as the English writer has been called, cut a stylish swath across…
thursday january 2 Miami Heat: Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway, and the rest of the Heat stars take on those wicked New Jersey Devils tonight at 7:30 at the Miami Arena (721 NW First Ave.). As of this writing, the Heat were 21-7 (ranking at the top of their division) and…
Now and again as I sit here on my power perch, having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets, or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some…
My first impulse in putting together a ten-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the re-released restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
“Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!” That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year — watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by…
Since its inception in May 1995, South Beach’s intimate EDGE/Theatre has garnered a reputation for venturing where no other local small theater dares to tread. Tucked away on the top floor of an Espanola Way gallery, the company has resurrected, with varying degrees of success, neglected work by Tennessee Williams…
A Mexican entry won top prize at last month’s Latin American Film Festival in Havana, but Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat was reportedly one of the hottest tickets, drawing capacity crowds to a heavily promoted late-night screening. The biopic that details the flashing rise and fall of the late New York artist…
thursday december 26 Beauty and the Beast: The Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) becomes an ice rink tonight at 8:00 as the Russian All-Stars Ice Theatre presents an ice-ballet version of the classic tale Beauty and the Beast. Choreographed by skating coach Tatiana…
When we first see the character of middle-aged Australian David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s standing in the driving rain and tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let inside by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him sound…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the stifled form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
In the program notes for the Pope Theatre Company’s edgy staging of the surreal comedy Below the Belt, playwright Richard Dresser is quoted as saying: “In the course of supporting myself as a writer over the past few decades, I’ve had the occasion to work at a series of jobs…
The frisky production of Ray Cooney’s 1990 comedy Out of Order currently on-stage at Coconut Grove Playhouse recalls a print advertisement from years ago. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye,” ran the copy under a picture of a satisfied customer chomping into a piece of bread…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works within whispering distance of the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough away to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
