thursday november 14 New Vision Florida/Brazil: Tigertail Productions continues its second annual Florida/Brazil arts exchange festival this weekend with a number of dance and music concerts, lectures, and video screenings. First up is a dance lecture and video screening with Brazil’s premier dance writer and critic Helena Katz, who will…
“I coulda been a contender,” Marlon Brando laments to Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Instead, he got “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.” Russ, Jerry, and Sid, the three unemployed Jersey City guys at the core of the droll, poignant new film Palookaville, share Brando’s ultimate destination. Like the ex-pugilist,…
Mother Night, a loving adaption of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel of the same name, should be required viewing as a companion piece to Casablanca. Like that Bogart classic, Mother Night has a powerful World War II love story at its core, and uses that tragic romance to address the tricky…
Legend has it that French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s aesthetic was shaped by an injunction from the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The young Cocteau, having achieved a minor measure of celebrity as a poet in Paris before World War I, complained to Diaghilev that the older man did…
The current show at ART-ACT in the Design District is part of QueeRoots/QueerSpace, a three-week festival of gay and lesbian culture that has included performance art, a poetry slam, and video screenings. Mark Holt, who will perform his monologue Queerbait Friday, November 15, also organized the exhibition, which is casually…
“It’s time to take the hot seat, Mary,” says Rafael Lima, leading a Thursday morning class in the play-writing program at New World School of the Arts (NWSA). Mary Manning’s cheeks flush as she pushes her hair behind her ears. Clutching a thick loose-leaf notebook, she makes her way to…
thursday november 7 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival: The eleventh annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival opened last week but now goes into full swing with screenings at five locations around Broward County, mainly at Coral Ridge Theatre (3401 NE 26th Ave., Fort Lauderdale). Among the films making their world…
Looking for Richard is Al Pacino’s shaggy, nutty, wheedling documentary about a staging of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the art of performance. Filmed between acting stints over a period of several years, it shows us Pacino in a flurry of guises. We see him as Richard, of course, but also…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s depth makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
The made-on-a-shoestring male bonding comedy Swingers has become a darling of the film festival circuit thanks to the cinematic equivalent of good cocktail chatter: smart, funny lines delivered by a handful of stylish, good-looking (but not overpoweringly so) young hipsters whose slick, trendy appearances mask vulnerable hearts. Jon Favreau, the…
thursday october 31 Halloween Extravoodooganza: Lincoln Road (between Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets in Miami Beach) celebrates Halloween by transforming into a haunted cemetery filled with tombstones and sarcophagi, an outdoor “Ghoul Town” art exhibition, and tons of creepy characters. From 3:30 to 5:30, costumed kids can stop at Lincoln Road…
I hate the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. I know, I know — film festivals are good for us, they give us a chance to see movies that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see, they bring area cinephiles together, et cetera. But after screening videos of FLIFF (not to be…
One-person shows. Single-character plays. Monodramas. Autobiographical monologues. By whatever term actors, promoters, or critics dub solo performances, the format — in which one artist attempts to mesmerize an audience throughout an entire evening — has proliferated on the theater scene in recent years. Just check the listings from London to…
Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco are commonly associated with work of heroic proportions. Renowned as leaders of the nationalist Mexican muralist movement in the first half of this century, their names have since been synonymous with revolutionary public art. Together with the sublime Rufino Tamayo, Rivera,…
thursday october 24 Felix Morisseau-Leroy: “Young men, are you beating your drum or just kidding/give me the sticks, I’ll teach you/or help you cultivate your field/and from however far one hears the message/from however far this Vodou is heard/from evening to morning/from however far one has run to come/one knows…
Let me give you a piece of advice regarding the movie Sleepers: As you settle into your seat for the opening credits and the phrase “based on a true story” appears, ignore it. Watch this movie as if it were a work of pure fiction. The best-selling book of the…
When is a soap opera not a soap opera? When it’s written and directed by a filmmaker as skilled as Mike Leigh and performed by actors as convincing as Brenda Blethyn and Timothy Spall in Leigh’s new film Secrets & Lies. Few plot lines have been as overworked in recent…
Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi) lost his pregnant girlfriend Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) to his best friend and former boss Rob (Anthony LaPaglia). To add insult to injury, Rob fired Tommy from the garage where both men worked as mechanics because Tommy “borrowed” $1500 from the till and gambled it away. Tommy,…
Baby boomer sensibility reached an all-time level of overexposure when the drama thirtysomething aired on television from 1987 through 1991. The show followed the angst-ridden escapades of white, educated, mostly overachieving and workaholic friends. Enamored with analyzing their every emotional twinge, this gang perfected an approach to life that blended…
thursday october 17 Kiss of the Spider Woman: Argentine actress Sandra Guida steamed up the stage when she took on the role of Aurora/Spider Woman in the original Buenos Aires production of this Tony Award-winning musical. Tonight at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts (174 E. Flagler St.), Guida…
An earnest, ambitious, and highly principled young lawyer takes on an unpopular case and uncovers evildoing in high places. Question #1: Which movie based on a John Grisham novel does that synopsis describe? Answer: All of them. Question #2: How many of those films suck? Answer: See Answer #1. Say…
You have to admire Shane Black. The guy writes ludicrous, thoroughly implausible scripts that should be laughed out of existence based on their premises alone, fleshes them out with brainless banter and stereotypical characters, and then sells them for more money than many far superior independent films have for their…
