When you think about Luciano Pavarotti, you probably don’t think about Brazilian cinema. Unless, of course, you’re Adriana Dutra, executive director of the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami, which is about to unspool its second season with a free April 4 beachfront showing of Sandra Werneck’s romantic comedy Little Book…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t seem so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s new movie Men with Guns plays better than his previous films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish or in Indian dialects. Set…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost Cubist narratives to the then burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, closeups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lies in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through…
When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script offers…
Thursday March 26 Thomas Lynch often walks among the dead. He’s not a zombie. He’s an undertaker and a writer. Lynch, who works as a funeral director in Michigan, has had poems and essays published in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and Harper’s. He’s…
During good times, it seems only fitting that we remind ourselves how bad times once were and could become again. This weekend academics from all over the country will flock to Miami to discuss just that — the good and bad old days — at Perspectives on New Deal America:…
“You ever see all the stunts that get done on-stage or in a film ? How [actors] take all those falls, kicks, punches, how they pull hair?” asks Stewart Solomon, president-owner of Creative WorkShops in Aventura. “That’s what this is.” This being an intensive two-day workshop in unarmed Combat for…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But…
In the male-dominated sport of sailing, women were once viewed as the weaker vessel, docile and helpless — not aggressive enough to take on an opponent on the high seas, not strong enough to manage basic tasks such as hoisting sails and trimming sheets. Men frowned on using women as…
His hands cupped to the sides of his face to block out the late afternoon sun’s glare, Paul George peers through the glass doors of a small mausoleum with the words “Somoza/Portocarrero” cut into the mottled marble just above his head. Inside, a four-foot-wide by eight-foot-long space. Mostly white marble…
Thursday March 19 An evening of sizzling song and dazzling dance awaits those who attend tonight’s Spanish Spectacular, presented by the Miami City Ballet. Topping the bill is Spain’s leading stage and recording star Paloma San Basilio, who, since launching her career in 1975, has starred in several television shows,…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported about an eleven-year-old child who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents…
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’s picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
Valentine’s Day is long gone, but the utterly charming revival of the 1963 musical She Loves Me at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables proves that romance is lasting. Certainly the story of feuding shop clerks who unwittingly fall for each other as pen pals has endured. First presented in…
thursday march 12 Subtropics 10 New Music Festival: Its different. It’s innovative. It’s that stuff you don’t hear on the radio very much, stuff you probably don’t have in your CD collection but think is incredibly cool nonetheless. We refer to experimental or new music. And the Subtropics festival is…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
“A man walks into a bar.” Stand-up comics have launched into routines with that line so often that it’s no surprise comedian-turned-movie actor Steve Martin chose the same setup to fuel the many laughs in his first effort as a playwright. In the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile,…
thursday march 5 Doral-Ryder Open: We have to admit that ever since Gerald Ford stopped missing the green and hitting the spectators with his errant drives, golf has lost a bit of its action-packed appeal. But the Doral-Ryder Open (in its 37th year, the longest-running PGA Tour event in the…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
thursday february 26 New York, New York: You may be far from New York City, but you can still help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the unification of Gotham’s boroughs by gazing at photographs up close. Classic images abound by Alfred Stieglitz, Andre Kertesz, Berenice Abbott, and others. Stieglitz, the…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
