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…
Early this year, in the psycho-gangster/vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, George Clooney of TV’s ER kept his head while all about him were losing theirs — literally. As a slick thief saddled with a lunatic brother (Quentin Tarantino) and beset by demons, Clooney demonstrated poise under duress. His professionalism…
thursday december 19 The Chocolate Nutcracker: A holiday classic gets a flavorful treatment as Buffalo Soldier Productions presents the East Coast premiere of LaVerne Reed’s Chocolate Nutcracker at the Dade County Auditorium (2901 W. Flagler St.). This version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, featuring the music of Duke Ellington and starring Bianca…
thursday december 12 1997 World Gold Gymnastics Tour: The Olympics are now a not-so-distant summer memory, but the fever (or the hype) lives on. Gold medalist Kerri Strug and silver medalist Jair Lynch, along with veteran Olympians Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner, are among the elastic gymnastics stars descending on…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment — just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man — or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
Since his debut as a novelist in 1963, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been surprising the public. Not only does he move with stylistic ease between forms (novels, short stories, criticism, journalism, essays, plays) and genres (political allegories, mysteries, erotica), he wreaks havoc with literary conventions in his fiction…
