Somebody please shoot me the next time I decide to attend a Herbert Ross movie. It seems like a century ago that the veteran hack made his best film, 1971’s Play It Again, Sam. And even then the picture’s success was undoubtedly attributable in greater measure to Woody Allen’s contributions…
Last year, my first as the movie reviewer here at New Times, the Miami Film Festival almost drove me crazy. I went berserk running to last-minute critics’ previews of festival offerings and fretting over the films I had yet to screen as my deadlines loomed. The logistics of transporting a…
Concurrent with Black History month, Florida Playwrights’ Theatre in Hollywood presents Sandra Fenichel Asher’s A Woman Called Truth, a staged biography of Sojourner Truth. Asher has fashioned an amalgam of dramatization, Sojourner’s own words, and period spirituals to tell the story of the inspirational nineteenth-century activist. The play opens at…
An extensive survey of works of art by Arab women, Forces of Change: Women Artists of the Arab World, currently can be seen at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus Centre Gallery and its InterAmerican Gallery in Little Havana. Organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington,…
The twelfth annual Miami Film Festival opens this Friday with local resident David Frankel’s sleek and smart Miami Rhapsody. Second-guessing the festival’s opening and closing selections has become an annual rite. I already have heard grumbling that a “deeper” film should have kicked off the schedule, something less facile and…
Men and women speak different languages. Many of us suspected this even before we read Deborah Tannen’s best seller You Just Don’t Understand, which documents the phenomenon. Even if her book brought no big surprises, it provided some comfort: Why hold ourselves responsible for a communication breakdown with the opposite…
On the last Friday of 1994, there were few visitors at the Center for the Fine Arts (CFA), and most of the staff was on holiday. Outside, near the bottom of the ramp leading to the esplanade of the Metro-Dade Cultural Center (which consists of the CFA, the main branch…
It’s a measure of the success of Roman Polanski’s screen adaption of Ariel Dorfman’s suspenseful, provocative play Death and the Maiden that by the end of the film one is not as troubled by the concept of WASP-y Sigourney Weaver playing a Latin woman named Paulina Escobar as by the…
Jean Genet is one of the bad boys of the Twentieth Century. Abandoned as an infant by his mother to the French public welfare system, he relished his position as a social outsider all his life and used his identities as homosexual, prostitute, thief, and prisoner as subject matter for…
On September 29, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly announced his support of a repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. armed forces. The public outcry was immediate. Opinion polls revealed a nation split fairly evenly on the subject. In January 1993, after taking office…
I have a number of bones to pick (sorry) with Demon Knight, a supposed horror movie from the perpetrators of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt anthology series. But the most damning criticism is the simplest: It just isn’t scary. Gross is another story. The filmmakers have trucked in barrels of…
Get out your leopard spandex and feather boas, your cigarette holders and gold lame, and go see Ruthless!, Joel Paley and Marvin Laird’s musical spoof at the Colony Theater that outcamps the campiest melodramas and show-biz films in the movie canon. But before you go, consider making a trip to…
The setting is a small impoverished town in Eastern Europe. The time is the middle of the Seventeenth Century. The heroine is a Jewish woman named Rachel: 28 years old, unattractive, and not prime marriage material. Not that she cares. With self-possession that would be the envy of a modern…
The American artist Man Ray had his first Paris show at the gallery Librairie Six in December 1921. The opening party, as recounted in the catalogue of “Man Ray’s Man Rays,” an exhibition now on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, was one of the…
One thing there’s no shortage of in this country is monitoring. Jesse Helms’s people monitor painters and photographers for homoerotic imagery or anti-Christian iconography. School boards monitor classic books for obscenity. There are even quasi-religious organizations out there that can tell you how many times Joe Pesci uttered variations on…
My momma always told me that year-end top-ten lists are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. A quick glance through other film critics’ nominations for the best and worst of 1994 confirms Momma’s wisdom. For example, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers and Entertainment Weekly’s Owen…
“Welcome to Beston,” the sign reads, “Home of the Bulldogs.” It’s a safe bet that the folks residing in that sleepy little upstate New York town never met a bulldog like Bridget Gregory (a.k.a. Wendy Kroy). Bridget is a Manhattan girl from the top of her impenetrable black shades to…
Wendy Wasserstein has been chronicling the female Zeitgeist for the American stage since the 1970s. From the gathering of college friends in Uncommon Women and Others through the tribulations of art historian Heidi Holland in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Heidi Chronicles, her signature has been intelligent heroines indulging in self-deprecating humor…
Robert Altman is the most feared slugger in American cinema. When he really connects, as he has in the past with M*A*S*H, Nashville, and The Player, he knocks the ball out of the park. So powerful is his stroke that even when he’s just trying to make contact he’s still…
Any idiot can write a boffo opening to a movie. The hard part is sustaining the suspense, comedy, or action for 90 minutes and then wrapping it all up neatly into a satisfying conclusion. That is why so many movies start with a bang and end with a whimper. It’s…
Among the many voices that weave in and out of Joe Pintauro’s stirring Men’s Lives, the drama now playing at the Pope Theatre Company in Manalapan, one in particular continues to haunt me. “Work can kill a man or keep him alive a hundred years,” says Walt, a fisherman on…
“Cuba: The Last Sixty Years,” an exhibition of 220 works that Texas art collector-businessman Robert Borlenghi purchased at state art galleries in Cuba earlier this year, has been on display at Borlenghi’s Pan American Art Gallery in Dallas for the past three months. It’s been causing controversy ever since. Some…
