thursday january 23 Classical Jazz Festival: The New World Symphony continues its celebration of classical music influenced by American jazz with a concert tonight at 8:00 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre (555 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach). Artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas not only conducts but makes a rare appearance as…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide what action to take. Meanwhile, he has been…
You can bet that at one point or another some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (the story does include such a character). While that wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is Fierce…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…
Since the early 1980s, Jane Martin has been offering the world well-received comedies and dramas such as Talking With …, a series of monologues by diverse women, and Keely and Du, an absurdist twist on the pro-choice debate in which a pregnant woman seeking an abortion is kidnapped by right-to-life…
thursday january 16 Jack and Jill: Florida Shakespeare Theatre explores love in the Nineties in this sexy and sly romantic comedy about complex currents of marriage and divorce. FTS artistic director Juan F. Cejas and actress Susanne Kreitman star as a couple who meet, mate, get dysfunctional, break up, make…
Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a sixteen-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…
Governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porter-ized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic or a blinkered snoot — maybe both — to persist in such a demonstration…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine Isabel Archer (Nicole…
Comedian Rob Becker, creator and star of Defending the Caveman, the longest running nonmusical solo show in the history of Broadway, has a little secret. He discovered it during the first year of his marriage and he let me in on it during a recent telephone interview from New York…
Parking is invariably scarce on Ponce de Leon Boulevard and the neighboring streets on the first Friday of the month. Perfume and cigar smoke cloud the air, and Coral Gables’s finest are out in force. In terms of numbers, the Coral Gables Gallery Walk, now in its fifth year, is…
thursday january 9 Festival of Chefs: Lick your lips and indulge your appetite when twenty chefs from some of South Florida’s finest restaurants cross spatulas tonight at 6:00 p.m. at the Sky Lobby of International Place (100 SE Second St.) to benefit the Easter Seal Society. A media-celebrity panel –…
The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The embodiment of the American Dream is a pornographer who admits to losing his virginity at age eleven to a chicken and is known for saying things such as “A woman’s vagina has as much personality…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (recent example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first…
Dry as a martini, smooth as a smoking jacket, pointed as the end of a cigarette holder — Noël Coward’s wit has been synonymous with jaded sophistication for almost three-quarters of a century. Personally and professionally, the Master, as the English writer has been called, cut a stylish swath across…
thursday january 2 Miami Heat: Alonzo Mourning, Tim Hardaway, and the rest of the Heat stars take on those wicked New Jersey Devils tonight at 7:30 at the Miami Arena (721 NW First Ave.). As of this writing, the Heat were 21-7 (ranking at the top of their division) and…
Now and again as I sit here on my power perch, having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets, or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some…
My first impulse in putting together a ten-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the re-released restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
“Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!” That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year — watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by…
Since its inception in May 1995, South Beach’s intimate EDGE/Theatre has garnered a reputation for venturing where no other local small theater dares to tread. Tucked away on the top floor of an Espanola Way gallery, the company has resurrected, with varying degrees of success, neglected work by Tennessee Williams…
A Mexican entry won top prize at last month’s Latin American Film Festival in Havana, but Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat was reportedly one of the hottest tickets, drawing capacity crowds to a heavily promoted late-night screening. The biopic that details the flashing rise and fall of the late New York artist…
thursday december 26 Beauty and the Beast: The Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) becomes an ice rink tonight at 8:00 as the Russian All-Stars Ice Theatre presents an ice-ballet version of the classic tale Beauty and the Beast. Choreographed by skating coach Tatiana…
