What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…
From 1915 through 1923, one and a half million Christian Armenians died at the hands of their Muslim Turkish neighbors as part of a holy war declared by the Turkish government. Entire families were wiped out; whole communities were brutally destroyed. Like so many other people turned into refugees by…
Promotional materials for last week’s Art Miami ’96 conferred upon the event the dubious distinction of “America’s Largest Mid-Winter International Art Fair.” Since Art Miami’s debut in 1991, organizers David and Lee Ann Lester have striven to position the annual showcase as the art world’s working winter vacation — akin…
Six dancers and some folding metal chairs set the stage for “The Office,” one of four works that the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Friday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. The members of the sextet whirl, throw their hands in the air, and stamp in repetitive…
Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…
Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…
It’s two weeks before Stewie’s bar mitzvah and his family is having a collective breakdown. Doris, his mother, sits on the couch transforming her wedding gown into a Bride of Frankenstein costume for Halloween. Herbie, his father, shuffles home after work and refuses to talk to anyone. Younger brother Mitchell…
If you thought Anthony Hopkins made a convincing psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, just wait until you see Nixon. Hopkins doesn’t so much imitate the vile, vindictive little megalomaniac as reconstruct him from the ground up. From the browbeaten face poking out turtlelike from between hunched shoulders to the…
Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…
The mark of a superb theatrical production lies in its ability to astonish us even after we’ve been saturated with reports of its power. News of an audacious version of J.B. Priestley’s 1945 An Inspector Calls reached these shores soon after director Stephen Daldry revived it in London in 1992…
A psychedelic color field of cloudlike forms trails swiftly along one wall of the darkened gallery of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), engulfing visitors in a sublime hallucination. Smoke Screen (part of Jennifer Steinkamp: Video Projection), a computer-generated installation by Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Steinkamp, brings the purist…
While Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to American audiences, one of his contemporary idols — Hong Kong noir director John Woo — is far less known on these shores. Woo’s unfortunate decision to team up with Brussels muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme for the director’s big shot at crossover success, 1993’s…
If you took 1978’s California Suite, replaced screenwriter Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross with four of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmaking guns, each writing and directing his or her own twenty-minute segment, and then coated the whole thing with a fizzy, retro Love, American Style vibe, the end result would…
I hate compiling year-end top-ten movie lists. No, I don’t have a Woody Allen-esque objection to the concept of ranking works of art in a competitive fashion. Nor am I one of those haughty nose-in-the-air types who tell anyone within earshot that there weren’t ten films worthy of approval this…
Penis envy may be ludicrous. The analyst’s couch may be passe. Still, there’s no eradicating the imprint Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality have left on our collective psyche in the last 100 years. Through his writing and research, Freud popularized dream interpretation, recognized infant sexuality, and acknowledged the wounds we…
Stand-up comic Jeff Garlin learned how to make people laugh from the bathtub. As a toddler, he cracked up his parents by filling a plastic toy with water and announcing that it was “concentrated.” He garnered even more chuckles with words such as girdle and Jamaica. A shtick that only…
Not surprisingly, boats, the most obvious symbols of exodus and displacement, have emerged as central pictorial components in the work of contemporary Cuban exile artists. The images of watercraft created by Cuban immigrants to Miami typically document real-life occurrences — most recently the rafter crisis in the summer of 1994…
When was the last time you saw a decent pirate movie? In recent years screen buccaneers have had better luck sacking filmmakers’ careers than they have a-pillagin’ and a-plunderin’. In 1980 Michael Ritchie’s The Island managed the extraordinary feat of out-dumbing the imbecilic Peter Benchley novel from which it was…
A young woman named Sabrina Fair, the daughter of the chauffeur for Long Island’s obscenely wealthy Larrabee family, misspends much of her youth perched in a tree spying on the dashing playboy David Larrabee as he seduces (and presumably abandons, although we never see the ugly part) a succession of…
“He loves her but she loves him And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win.” — J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks” The leap from Jane Austen novel to J. Geils Band song is not as great as you might think. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, dignified Colonel Brandon yearns…
Sometimes I wish these guys would just fuck and be done with it. When you blow away the cloud of steam generated by the generic cops, robbers, and one-last-heist-that-goes-bad plot line, Michael Mann’s new film Heat boils down to a love story between two men. But because this is a…
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…
