Like The Perez Family, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Underneath, ultimately underachieves despite flashes of brilliance. Soderbergh tries his hand at film noir with disappointing results, largely because all the clever editing, time-frame juggling, droll dialogue, and unconventional camerawork cannot conceal a pencil-thin narrative that boils down to this: A…
It probably won’t do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did. May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory…
Like the character Timothy in Neil’s Garden, an exceptionally well-acted, well-directed world premiere now at Area Stage on Miami Beach, I am not reasonable about death. Just the mention of it causes me to knock on wood. Death is not to be thought about now, but rather something to be…
I don’t know how I’d go about making the ultimate film about the Chicano experience in the U.S. without resorting to cliches and stereotypes. But I don’t feel so bad; Gregory Nava didn’t have a clue, either, and somebody gave him a pile of money to tackle the job. In…
Gerard Depardieu may well be the greatest actor in the world, but you can’t blame American moviegoers for doubting the veracity of that claim if their only familiarity with Depardieu’s work stems from his three strikes at cross-Atlantic stardom: Green Card (1990), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and My Father,…
Lily Tomlin has done it. John Leguizamo, Sherry Glaser, Danny Hoch, Eric Bogosian, Claudia Shear, and a host of other names I could drop may be doing it even as you read this: that is, presenting an evening of theater by embodying an array of characters. Currently in our own…
The 1994-95 exhibition season has offered a number of group shows of works by local artists. These demonstrations of support have called upon a handful of artists who seem, for the moment at least, to top every curator’s list. With all due respect to those artists, a spectator’s sense of…
I hope all the hue and cry over David Caruso’s decision to bolt from TV’s NYPD Blue to pursue a career as a leading man in Hollywood does not muffle the bang made by Nicolas Cage in Caruso’s first film since the split. Cage is in peak form in Kiss…
Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
South Florida is not a region that takes many theatrical risks. A quick study of the current season’s lineup for theaters from Palm Beach to Miami makes one thing perfectly clear: Reluctant to strain audience loyalty by introducing what hasn’t passed a viewer test somewhere else, most artistic directors tend…
Like many artists educated in Cuba who have moved to Miami over the past few years, Consuelo Castaneda speaks only a little English, communicating with Anglos through a translator. The clever, slickly executed paintings in To Be Bilingual, Castaneda’s current exhibition at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Coral Gables, explore…
Forrest Gump’s momma said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. Too bad Pauly Shore didn’t grow up under her care, as well. Stupidity is not just another word to Totally Pauly. It’s a vocation. Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, Pauly’s latest exercise in pointless poppycock and narcissistic nonsense is…
The Tennessee Williams-style Southern family, at its liquor-soaked, lust-ridden, and venal best, rises again in Kendall this month in a spirited production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actors’ Playhouse presents Williams’s modern classic in all its comedic and Southern Gothic glory, 40 years after its Broadway debut. The…
“Gluttony is not a secret vice,” lamented the late great writer-director-actor-bon vivant Orson Welles, a man as well-remembered for his prodigious girth as for his oversized talent. Marlon Brando, who vies with Welles for the distinction of being the most feared, respected, influential, and caricatured figure in post-World War II…
Far be it from me to second-guess the platinum-plated producing tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Money talks, and nowhere does its voice carry more weight than in Hollywood, where the Simpson-Bruckheimer team churn out sleek but vapid entertainments that regularly rack up spectacular box-office returns. Since their initial…
Angels in America has been hailed as vast, miraculous, and sweeping, the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time. Whether such superlatives are justified or not remains to be determined, but one thing is certain — the two-part drama subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” has been…
The Sum of Us is an Australian vessel from stern to bow. David Stevens, an award-winning Aussie screenwriter (Breaker Morant) and filmmaker (the TV miniseries A Town Like Alice) scripted it. Jack Thompson, a fixture in Australian cinema as well as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees and a…
Straight, middle-age widower Harry Mitchell just wants to make his gay son, Jeff, happy. Nothing wrong with that. But Harry tries so hard to encourage Jeff’s alternative lifestyle that he becomes a well-meaning nuisance. Eventually Harry learns that no matter how pure your motives or how badly you want to…
Shortly before New York City’s Guggenheim Museum opened the first major American exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys in 1979, the institution’s then-director Thomas Messer sent a letter to members of his board of trustees, warning them that the work would not find favor with the general public. Indeed,…
Here’s my fatal flaw as a film critic: After more than three decades of moviegoing, I still walk into a theater expecting the filmmaker to show me fairly quickly why I should give a damn about his protagonist. Experience has taught me that if I’m not hooked within the first…
During a question-and-answer session with the audience following the screening of the film Exotica at the Miami Film Festival in February, someone asked writer-director Atom Egoyan whether a closing shot of a troubled young woman entering an ominous-looking house signified that the woman was a murderer. Egoyan raised an eyebrow…
The Pope Theatre Company’s production of Steven Dietz’s Lonely Planet took me by surprise. Partway through the two-character play I found myself squirming in my seat, consulting my watch, and wishing something A anything A would happen in the long-winded, overly anecdotal, and slow-moving drama. By the end, something does…
