At the risk of coming off like some stodgy codger bemoaning the passing of the good old days of American cinema, it really does seem to me that these days they don’t make quality American movies like they did in the Seventies. The Godfather (I and II), Five Easy Pieces,…
Belinda and Philip Haas’s (she produced; he directed; they both wrote the screenplay) slow but absorbing production of Angels & Insects reminded me of Peter Greenaway’s 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract. Both films are English period pieces, although Greenaway’s film is set in the Seventeenth Century, while the Haases’ takes place…
Surely by now the cinematic love triangle has become one of France’s most enduring exports. Nobody plays more variations on the old three-part harmony than the French. Heck, most English-speaking countries don’t even have an equivalent for the phrase “menage a trois.” It’s kind of ironic then that while we…
Last fall Coconut Grove Playhouse was all set to conclude its 1995-96 season with Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. But at the last minute the show’s New York City-based producers booked the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama on a 1996-97 national tour, precluding its being presented at regional theaters such as the…
If British playwright Rod Dungate’s 1992 Playing by the Rules has an intelligible point of view, a consistent focus, or even a story worth telling, it’s impossible to discern from its current production at Edge/Theatre on Miami Beach. Adapted for the American stage (reconstituted into a South Beach version) and…
Just as too many chefs spoil the broth, too many screenwriters spoil the script. In the case of the disappointing City Hall, a roster of four heavyweights — three from the world of movie writing and one from the world of high finance — contributes to a muddled screenplay that…
I have a confession to make: I haven’t watched the annual orgy of stupidity, vanity, and self-congratulation popularly known as the Academy Awards in years. The Oscars are a farce, an abomination, a laughingstock, a repugnant folly, an insult to the intelligence of any moviegoer with even a modicum of…
David French’s two-character gem Salt-Water Moon contains few dramatic revelations. Less than one-third of the way into the 90-minute one-act, the author has already played out most of his narrative hand: Boy loves girl; boy leaves girl; girl gets engaged to another boy; first boy returns and attempts to win…
Last November the New York City-based artist team Leone & McDonald placed a classified ad in New Times: “Ever passed for something you’re not? Celebrated NY artists need story for video on Miami.” The responses the pair received confirmed their perception of Miami as the perfect place to create a…
Like the world itself, world music can be a scary place. When you don’t know a djembe from a darbukah, when nothing ever sounds even remotely like “Hot Blooded,” it’s easy to give up and play Graceland again. As the curious titles of its pair of recent releases might hint,…
The dreaded date movie. Snotty critics such as myself hate the genre because real-life moviegoers tend to hold date movies to a different standard: “Did you like it?” “Well, there was no story, the jokes weren’t funny, and the characters talked like somebody lifted their dialogue straight out of Cosmo…
If cynicism breeds contempt, obscurity can often breed cynicism. This is common knowledge in the blues world, which for decades has been overpopulated with hard-bitten also-rans untouched by the hand of popularity. For all the B.B. Kings, Robert Crays, and Buddy Guys out there who have parlayed their years of…
That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…
When Hermann Goering met Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1922, he pledged a lifetime of service to the future German fhrer. Goering worked tirelessly within the German political system to ensure that Hitler gained absolute power in 1933. Serving as Hitler’s second in command, Goering headed the formidable Luftwaffe (the…
The innovative and provocative choreography performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was stirring up debate long before dance critic Arlene Croce denounced the troupe’s most recent — and most ambitious — work. “I have not seen [choreographer] Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review…
A small striped rubber ball bobs in a claw-footed bathtub half-filled with dingy water. The words “Since Marcel Duchamp all the avant-garde artists are soaking in the same water of the same bathtub” have been scrawled in black script around the rim of the tub, a 1991 work by French…
Last year’s Miami Film Festival introduced Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to Miami audiences, and what an introduction it was. Kiarostami’s three films — Where Is My Friend’s Home?, And Life Goes On . . . , and Through the Olive Trees — were like nothing seen around these parts before…
Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know…
While each year the general public awaits the unveiling of a colorful poster heralding the arrival of the Miami Film Festival (February 2-11), I await the annual unveiling of an equally colorful excuse for not being able to preview festival films in time to meet my deadline. This year I…
Profiles of Kenneth Anger often express surprise that the legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood tell-all books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II is, to quote Betsy Sherman of the Boston Globe, “cordial and soft-spoken in conversation, with no fangs in evidence.” After all, Fireworks, Anger’s first film…
In Herb Gardner’s 1962 A Thousand Clowns, dogged nonconformist Murray Burns divides the human race into two categories: those who love pastrami and those who don’t. Inspired by Murray, I’m moved to classify humanity in another way: those who love Herb Gardner and those who don’t. Members of the group…
Dead Man Walking offers many surprises, but none more astonishing than the mere fact that writer-director Tim Robbins — a man who has not been shy about stating his liberal political ideas in interviews — could avoid preaching, and present such a balanced take on a subject as emotionally charged…
