Touted as a comedy-thriller, Corpse! is more accurately a thriller-comedy in which the suspenseful plotting of the first act gives way to farce in the second. Picture a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery starring Benny Hill and you’ll have some idea of the myriad plot twists and loony…
thursday february 5 Miami Festival of Discovery: An international passel of hot young pianists will dazzle you with their digits for three days at what sounds like an event dedicated to Christopher Columbus but is actually an exploration of musical virtuosity. Today and tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. Edna Golandsky, of…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
thursday january 29 Public Works Film Series: See for yourself how bad times really were during the Depression by checking out the adjuncts to the exhibition “Public Works” at the Wolfsonian-FIU (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach). In addition to a series of lectures and performances commencing next week, the museum…
You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don’t bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist — not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year’s renewal…
The Othello Project, on-stage at the Florida Shakespeare Theatre in Coral Gables, takes its Deep South setting and part of its title from the Mississippi Project, in which more than 800 college students went down to promote black voter registration in the summer of 1964. Less than two weeks into…
thursday january 22 Miami Modernism: Have you developed a passion for collecting items from the Twentieth Century and want to expand your hunting grounds beyond garage sales and thrift stores? Miami Modernism is the ticket. For the next four days at the Ramada Resort Deauville (6701 Collins Ave., Miami Beach),…
After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged every December, Hollywood dumps its lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the new year. In recent times these have included the airplane “thriller” Turbulence (1997), Bio-Dome and Two If by Sea (1996), and Cabin Boy (1994). This year we’ve…
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…
