One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience; it’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…
James Joyce’s work is an acquired taste. Whereas the Irishman’s short-story collection Dubliners (1914) is an easy read, his later novels have been banned from my beach bag because of his experiments in style. Not willing to thread my way through the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Portrait of the Artist as…
thursday january 15 New World Symphony: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas spends a lot of time away, but whenever he and the New World Symphony get together some marvelous music is the result. Tonight the orchestra inaugurates its Music from America Festival, a ten-day exploration of compositions written by or orchestrated…
Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…
The recent referendum creating Miami-Dade County is just the latest sign the area is suffering from an identity crisis worse than Sally Fields’s in Sybil. While the county government proffers the moniker as an all-purpose consumer label, many residents would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as typical Miamians. That’s not…
thursday january 8 Florida Philharmonic with Cachao and Nestor Torres: The Florida Philharmonic goes Latin tonight with a program titled Serie Latina de Mœsica Pop Miami. That mouthful means Latin Pop Music Series Miami. And while we don’t exactly know what songs will be performed, we do know who will…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without the Troubles? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
The convoluted political negotiations surrounding Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba next week seem facile compared to the grave robbing, relic switching, and sundry other ecumenical dirty tricks attendant to a papal visit in playwright Michael Hollinger’s farce Incorruptible. Even though the play’s setting in France sometime around 1250…
thursday january 1 West Side Star-crossed love and gang warfare supply the backdrop for West Side Story, one of American theater’s most revered musicals. In 1957 a quartet of creative minds — composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, librettist Arthur Laurents, and director-choreographer Jerome Robbins — conceived this spirited takeoff…
When was the last time an audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
thursday december 25 Orange Bowl International Tennis Championships: Athletes never rest. That’s why they rake in millions of dollars for playing (yes, playing) a sport every day, while you just scrape by on your meager wages. That’s why they are in superb shape as they bounce around parks and arenas…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
With 1994’s Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada’s leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan’s hold on that title. Egoyan’s work in general is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown hadn’t arrived weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 best seller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man — free certainly in a good way, and perhaps also in a not-so-good way. Liberated, for whatever reason, from the need to play a nice guy, Allen can play the bad man he does here free of the…
thursday december 18 Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo’s turbulent, mystical abstractions evoke Afro-Cuban symbols, European icons, violence, sex, the specter of death, and the tropics (his mural in the Santa Clara Metrorail station, The Mystery of the Tropics, typifies his grand scale). One of Miami’s most celebrated and beloved…
If one is in a biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as a divine act of one-upsmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series — with 50-odd entries in 30 years — has presumably drawn to a close after the death last year of star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula…
At a time when gang-related drive-by killings plague the nation’s major cities, a 40-year-old musical in which two rival packs sit down to a war council at the local soda shop and order “Cokes all around” should seem hopelessly dated. Yet when a police detective shows up spewing racial slurs…
Frida Kahlo’s boyfriend recalled seeing her drenched in blood and coated with gold dust. The boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and his eighteen-year-old companion were returning to their homes in suburban Mexico City one September day in 1925 when the city bus on which they were riding collided with a streetcar…
