Jennifer Montgomery’s semiautobiographical Art for Teachers of Children positions itself as a dispassionate, disquietingly original take on underage sex and the line between child pornography and art. From the get-go the film assails your notions of exactly what the age of consent is — or ought to be — as…
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde touched a collective nerve when it was first published in 1886. The provocative story of a scientist who unleashes the darkest parts of his nature by drinking an elixir spawned its first staged version the following year,…
In 1991’s Father of the Bride, doting suburban white-bread proto-papa George Banks (Steve Martin) went deeply into debt to stage a perfect wedding for his suddenly all-growed-up little girl Annie (Kimberly Williams). Nina Banks (Diane Keaton) sighed a lot and tried to allay her husband’s anxieties. In the newly released…
Imagine an ethnically mixed inner-city neighborhood devoid of drug deals and drive-by shootings. Older residents leave their apartments without fear of getting mugged. Young black men are not harassed by police. And every morning in this urban enclave a Jew, a Chicano, and a black man gather in a corner…
Two school security guards in green T-shirts and khaki pants stand inside the doorway of Horace Mann Middle School as a group of seventh graders excitedly gather around a large mural painted in the front hallway. The face of a young man with a determined expression stares out from the…
La Dolce Vita meets the Magic City with the arrival of Cinema Italiano Oggi (Miami’s Italian Film Festival). A five-day orgy of new movies, restored classics, elegant parties, and hobnobbing with the leading lights of modern Italian cinema, the festival kicked off yesterday, November 29, with the screening of Michele…
Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought but distinctively stylish variation on an overworked cinematic genre — the corrupt cop movie. His latest release, The Addiction, takes an unconventional bite into an even more played-out category: the vampire movie (or, to be more specific, the unhappy-vampire movie). After being accosted…
As the opening titles for White Man’s Burden unscroll, you know right away that you’ve entered a very different world. White lawn jockeys adorn the tidy estates of affluent black suburbanites. Caucasians slink furtively through the shadows of city streets at night, dealing drugs, selling their bodies, and looking for…
You may not know that the 1966 musical Man of La Mancha takes place in a prison cell during the Spanish Inquisition. You may not know that the play’s main character is Miguel de Cervantes, the sixteenth-century Spanish author who wrote the masterpiece novel Don Quixote. And you may not…
You don’t want to wager against Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a professional sports gambler whose handicapping prowess is so formidable that he can change the odds merely by placing his bet. Ace makes scads of money for a coterie of delighted Midwestern mob bosses, who eventually reward him…
Some of the finest movies of the past three years have been documentaries: Hoop Dreams, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, and Crumb. Add Steven M. Martin’s thoroughly absorbing Theremin to that list. The movie is so fascinating, frightening, and hilariously funny that no one could have made it…
Memo to James Bond To: James Bond From: Todd Anthony Re: GoldenEye Welcome to the Nineties, 007. I thought you were dead, a victim of the changing times and the inability of the guardians of the Bond legacy to find a suitable actor to play you. Pierce Brosnan will never…
Just what the world needs — another girl-meets-girl movie. The chicks-who-dig-chicks love story minigenre has pretty much played itself out since go fish made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival nearly three years ago. Last year’s Heavenly Creatures was probably the category’s apogee; the new When Night Is Falling…
Horny commanders-in-chief are nothing new. Nor is the sight of Michael Douglas playing a WASPy Everyman whose dick gets him into trouble. However, the concept of a widowed president playing the dating game under the constant scrutiny of TV cameras, opportunistic political opponents, and religious zealots sounds like a fertile…
In his elegantly directed production of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, director Rafael de Acha tellingly gives Cole Porter the last word. As the lights dim at the end of this wistful comedy, “Begin the Beguine” drifts over the sound system at New Theatre in Coral Gables. Porter’s rhapsody to romantic…
With Designing Modernity, the Wolfsonian museum’s much-anticipated inaugural exhibition, Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson, Jr., finally reveals his infamous private obsession to the public. Wolfson’s massive assemblage of furniture, household appliances, books, architectural maquettes, prints, paintings, objets d’art, and ephemera tells the story of modernism through “The Arts of Reform and Persuasion”…
“It’s a date-rape movie,” declares first-time filmmaker Douglas Tirola. The 27-year-old writer-director of A Reason to Believe doesn’t beat around the bush; neither does his smart, well-intentioned movie. A Reason to Believe tells the story of Charlotte (Allison Smith, who played Jane Curtin’s daughter on Kate & Allie), a cute,…
Is the world ready for “a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki,” as the twentysomething writer-director-editor-producer’s new project, The Doom Generation, bills itself? Araki, already a pioneer of queer new-wave cinema (The Living End, Totally F**ked Up), moves into the world of big-time 35mm moviemaking with this, his fifth film. Those…
Relationships between mothers and daughters are never simple. Whether they lean on each other, dominate each other, envy each other, criticize each other, reject each other, or seek each other out, mothers and daughters find themselves enmeshed throughout their lives. The dramatic possibilities in such attachments have not been lost…
Movies about attractive twentysomethings sitting around talking about themselves have been all the rage lately. You could take everything that happens in Slacker, Reality Bites, Clerks, Before Sunrise, Bodies, Rest & Motion, Sleep With Me, and Barcelona and pack it into one movie and you still wouldn’t have as much…
On the surface, Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaption of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 An Enemy of the People seems theatrical proof of the French adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Set in a nineteenth-century Norwegian town, the drama’s subject matter mirrors headlines in the 1990s: poisoned…
One morning last month, Gustavo Matamoros arrived at Miami International Airport to find that his flight to Tampa had been canceled. For Matamoros, the director of the South Florida Composers Alliance, the two-hour wait for the next plane to Tampa was not so much an inconvenience as it was what…
