The festival closes as it began with an adaptation of an early twentieth-century novel by Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defence, a disappointing finale to what has been a very strong program overall. The film follows an obsessed Russian chess master, Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro), who in the late 1920s arrives…
“The greatness of a film is out there at a point beyond the lines,” says novelist and sometime screenwriter Robert Stone. “It’s really how those lines are made to play in terms of photography, in terms of so many other elements. Writing for the movies, I think, is something relatively…
Brazil’s colonial roots date back to the year 1500 when the Portuguese came to town, wreaked havoc on the vast area’s millions of indigenous residents, then began importing slaves in droves from West Africa to labor on plantations. Centuries later, one byproduct of those dishonorable intentions is the fascinating intermingling…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
If translation is treason, as Argentine author Jorge Borges said, then adaptation might be considered assassination — especially when it comes to reviving a Tennessee Williams work, which more often than not results in catastrophe. Not in the case of the attempt by Cuban-born director Rolando Moreno, whose sensitivity to…
Winter Shorts 2001: Best of the Fest! is a collection of the best scripts from the festival of one-acts that began in 1996 and is reproduced in a two-hour performance that is both lively and entertaining. City Theatre has found its niche and a strong troupe of actors to carry…
On Golden PonderingLet us now praise famous filmmakers, specifically the lauded team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, whose latest film, The Golden Bowl, headlines the Miami Film Festival. In forty years and seventeen theatrical productions, this team has compiled a superlative record of finely wrought films, almost…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Brazilian cinema has to be one of the most underrated sources in today’s movie industry, at least from an American perspective. While Hollywood troglodytes are only now waking up to the pleasures of Latin filmmaking, studio-level attention largely is focused on Spain and stories that can be considered “crossover.” One…
The most important thing to remember while watching La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) is that this is not a documentary. Because Colombia usually is represented in international cinema as the den of drug lords, it is easy to take offense at this portrayal as yet…
Bare legs splayed, long neck bared, a woman’s body mimics the form of a large block-print capital letter A, onto which her photographic image is superimposed. In a black skullcap with white stripes and a matching Twenties-style bathing suit costume, local choreographer and dancer Elaine Wright brings this 75-year-old vision…
“I’m covered with paint, all colors,” says a spry Grace Slick on the phone at 7:00 a.m. Pacific time from her Malibu, California, home. The 61-year-old Slick, owner of the vigorous voice that guided the Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship to hits such as “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”…
You have to wonder about a circus that has a mission statement. Devoid of midgets, animals, and freaks, Cirque du Soleil is no ordinary spectacle. No girls hanging from their hair, no men shooting out of cannons, no dancing elephants. Just a bunch of highly flexible acrobats clad in brightly…
Charging lions, smiling natives, preening supermodels — all have their place in the life of intrepid photographer Peter Beard. Born in 1938 into an affluent family, the dashing Beard eschewed studies in medicine in favor of art. Reading Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa compelled him to visit that continent in…
Sometimes, usually out on the golf course near his home in upstate New York, Dan DeCarlo feels terrific, far younger than his 81 years. He’ll thwack the ball, reflect upon his 55 years of marriage to the same beautiful woman and occasionally contemplate a life spent drawing and creating some…
But God rattled on in his holy language about all kinds of important stuff, life-and-death stuff, and Moses just sat there like a Grade A number one goof, not understanding a single word. Well, you know what he felt like? He felt like some miserable little twelve-year-old kid from West…
Little has been said about the ubiquitous effect of irony in much of today’s art. Irony allows detachment, a trend that may have started with Dada, the first anarchic movement in modern art history. After a catastrophic first world war, Dadaists had good reasons to resent absolutes. When Genezyp Kapen,…
The renowned South African playwright Athol Fugard has one commanding subject: his vivid social outcasts’ lifelong confrontation with the oppression of apartheid, and the nobility of their survival. In Boesman and Lena, written in 1969 as the third part of a dramatic trilogy that also included Blood Knot and Hello…
Lance Barton, thin as paper and frail as fine china, is such a horrific stand-up that during an amateur-night performance at the Apollo Theater, he is booed with so much force, he’s literally knocked off the stage. Lance’s manager insists he’s a failure because he’s afraid of being himself: Lance…
The four friends at the center of the smart 1998 Venezuelan social satire Little Thieves, Big Thieves (Cien Años de Perdon) recall the motley group of male strippers in the British sleeper The Full Monty (1997). Like the underdogs of that film, the foursome in Thieves is composed of desperate…
When the lights finally came up in the Washington, D.C., movie theater, Leonard Nimoy sat still, silent, and a bit shaken. He could scarcely believe what he had seen–and what he had not seen. The movie was beautiful, but beneath the surface sheen, there was no heart, no soul. It…
If the British have a love-hate relationship with the French, it could be said that Americans have a laugh-hate relationship with the Brits. What we find riotously funny in them is what we abhor in ourselves: repressed sexuality, sniveling impishness, and hostility behind a thin veneer of civility. Words like…
