A Picasso: Reviewed in this issue. Through May 2. Coconut Grove Playhouse, 3500 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove. 305-442-4000. Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are…
Love & Slavery in Miami: Willie Keddell is an artist who tills the fields of perception. The urban furrows of marginality are his seedbed of imagination. His work’s soulful aesthetic is abundant with concrete decay, the graffiti of untrod spaces, and the plaintive lament of the dispossessed. With assistance from…
A lot can happen in six years. And it seems just about everything has for the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Drama, intrigue, tragicomedy with plot twists and turns to keep followers of the event, especially the internal politics of it, on the edge of their seats, with a…
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it is hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the…
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms — which it definitely deserves — Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large, pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically…
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
He’s a funny little enigma, that Prince guy. You could say he’s the original metrosexual. You could say he’s a religious freak. You could say he’s a sex god and a genius. In his early years, Prince pranced around in lingerie and hip boots, singing dirty lyrics like a nasty…
In February and March Mareeta McIntyre’s Eagle Care Productions was so jammed up with the jams it was presenting that the Super Talent Showcase had to be delayed three weeks. A mere ten days before the event, she and her crew were still auditioning acts to find the best of…
NOW 24/7 How do you own the moon? Many have tried; few have succeeded. Lunar expeditions have gotten rockets to land there and astronauts to bounce around in the gravity-less atmosphere. Painters such as Van Gogh, Rousseau, and O’Keeffe, and photographers such as Ansel Adams have rendered the planet in…
SAT 4/24 At the beginning of the 2003-04 season Miami Heat fans had a serious case of the doldrums. Megamoney draft pick Lamar Odom provided a glimmer of hope, but when the team went 0-7 all bets were off. Soon after, legendary coach Pat Riley threw in the towel, leaving…
SAT 4/24 Fifteen of Miami’s most dynamic street poets face off today, battling in a word-slinging competition for the title of Urban Poet Laureate for South Florida and a $500 prize. Each of the poets competing today is a winner of Lip Tongue Ear Productions’ monthly poetry slam contests, which…
SAT 4/24 Alejandro Sanz was selling out stadiums in Mexico when 10 terrorist bombs exploded this past March in Madrid. While watching the terrible images on television of hundreds killed and wounded, he recognized the backdrop: the houses of old friends, the station where he used to catch the fast…
Thursday 4/22 Whenever your child asks for yet another advance on his allowance, you always throw out the same responses: “What am I, the Bank of America? Maybe if you had to work for a living, you wouldn’t be so quick to blow all your money!” Well, today the little…
How far will one friend go for another? In Trembling Hands, Ivonne Azurdia’s grotesque, funny crime drama now in its world premiere by the Mad Cat Theatre Company, the answer is very, very far indeed. Following up on her splendid Tin Box Boomerang, a hit for Mad Cat last season,…
Catering to obsessed foodies who crave tasting menus, and battling boorish socialites who demand priority seating, Sam Peliczowski mans the telephone lines booking reservations at a wildly popular Manhattan restaurant. In Fully Committed we meet Sam, an actor for whom this is a pays-the-rent job, and a colorful cast of…
Flyin’ West: Set in 1898, Flyin’ West follows three black sisters who’ve left the South and struck out on their own, settling in Nicodemus, Kansas. The hardships of freedom and independence are compounded by their struggle to protect themselves from white speculators trying to buy their land and splinter their…
Every Atom: Natalia Benedetti’s new work might be considered an offspring of Warhol’s marathon Empire State Building film, but amped-up by technology and a hefty NoDoz factor. In Benedetti’s take, a lazy exterior shot of a glass-walled apartment building on Biscayne Bay, endlessly looping in a tight grid, shimmers with…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
When the lights first flickered on for Cinema Vortex back in 1993, it was little more than a cool name with the occasional screenings to go with it. Repertory and experimental art films were its trade, playing to small audiences of mostly hard-core cinephiles. The event chugged along in the…
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in…
What’s on your mind, crocodile? Where have you been, Mr. Owl? How’s your cholesterol, Flipper? If your curiosity about wild creatures and their habitats keeps you up at night, you might need to go see them for yourself. Of course, chatting up a croc face-to-face is a daunting proposition. A…
