If cynicism breeds contempt, obscurity can often breed cynicism. This is common knowledge in the blues world, which for decades has been overpopulated with hard-bitten also-rans untouched by the hand of popularity. For all the B.B. Kings, Robert Crays, and Buddy Guys out there who have parlayed their years of…
That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…
When Hermann Goering met Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1922, he pledged a lifetime of service to the future German fhrer. Goering worked tirelessly within the German political system to ensure that Hitler gained absolute power in 1933. Serving as Hitler’s second in command, Goering headed the formidable Luftwaffe (the…
The innovative and provocative choreography performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was stirring up debate long before dance critic Arlene Croce denounced the troupe’s most recent — and most ambitious — work. “I have not seen [choreographer] Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review…
A small striped rubber ball bobs in a claw-footed bathtub half-filled with dingy water. The words “Since Marcel Duchamp all the avant-garde artists are soaking in the same water of the same bathtub” have been scrawled in black script around the rim of the tub, a 1991 work by French…
Last year’s Miami Film Festival introduced Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to Miami audiences, and what an introduction it was. Kiarostami’s three films — Where Is My Friend’s Home?, And Life Goes On . . . , and Through the Olive Trees — were like nothing seen around these parts before…
Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know…
While each year the general public awaits the unveiling of a colorful poster heralding the arrival of the Miami Film Festival (February 2-11), I await the annual unveiling of an equally colorful excuse for not being able to preview festival films in time to meet my deadline. This year I…
Profiles of Kenneth Anger often express surprise that the legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood tell-all books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II is, to quote Betsy Sherman of the Boston Globe, “cordial and soft-spoken in conversation, with no fangs in evidence.” After all, Fireworks, Anger’s first film…
In Herb Gardner’s 1962 A Thousand Clowns, dogged nonconformist Murray Burns divides the human race into two categories: those who love pastrami and those who don’t. Inspired by Murray, I’m moved to classify humanity in another way: those who love Herb Gardner and those who don’t. Members of the group…
Dead Man Walking offers many surprises, but none more astonishing than the mere fact that writer-director Tim Robbins — a man who has not been shy about stating his liberal political ideas in interviews — could avoid preaching, and present such a balanced take on a subject as emotionally charged…
You say you always wanted to go to film school but you couldn’t afford the tuition? You panic when some pompous cineaste such as me expounds upon the parallels between Pauly Shore’s work in Bio-Dome and Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times? You wouldn’t know Meliäs from Mayles, or Battleship Potemkin…
You read the play in high school. You sat through a version trotted out by a community theater group. Perhaps you saw Dustin Hoffman portray Willy Loman in the 1984 revival on Broadway, or watched Hoffman in the made-for-television edition. If you’ve been going to the theater long enough, you…
What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…
From 1915 through 1923, one and a half million Christian Armenians died at the hands of their Muslim Turkish neighbors as part of a holy war declared by the Turkish government. Entire families were wiped out; whole communities were brutally destroyed. Like so many other people turned into refugees by…
Promotional materials for last week’s Art Miami ’96 conferred upon the event the dubious distinction of “America’s Largest Mid-Winter International Art Fair.” Since Art Miami’s debut in 1991, organizers David and Lee Ann Lester have striven to position the annual showcase as the art world’s working winter vacation — akin…
Six dancers and some folding metal chairs set the stage for “The Office,” one of four works that the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Friday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. The members of the sextet whirl, throw their hands in the air, and stamp in repetitive…
Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…
Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…
It’s two weeks before Stewie’s bar mitzvah and his family is having a collective breakdown. Doris, his mother, sits on the couch transforming her wedding gown into a Bride of Frankenstein costume for Halloween. Herbie, his father, shuffles home after work and refuses to talk to anyone. Younger brother Mitchell…
If you thought Anthony Hopkins made a convincing psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, just wait until you see Nixon. Hopkins doesn’t so much imitate the vile, vindictive little megalomaniac as reconstruct him from the ground up. From the browbeaten face poking out turtlelike from between hunched shoulders to the…
Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…
