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…
If you’ve ever watched a junior high school theatrical production of a venerable, time-honored play in which no one gets anything quite right — not the acting, not the sets, not the direction — then you’ll recognize the discomfort caused by the off-pitch romantic comedy Speechless. Screenwriter Robert King (author…
Here we go again. Another painfully sincere filmmaker embraces the enduring myth of the noble savage. Jodie Foster, sweetheart of the Gap-and-Birkenstocks set, not only stars in Nell, she produced it as well. Foster is a talented, articulate actress with both brains and guts, two commodities in short supply in…
Exile is not simple. Both a physical reality and a psychological state, it can be imposed by governments or chosen as a means of survival. It breeds nostalgia and longing, shame and guilt. It can be a burden or a source of pride. But in all instances, it’s characterized by…
There’s something admirably gutsy about an independent filmmaker choosing mother-son incest as the subject of his first film, then making it on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns. No matter how good a picture it may be, a topic this disturbing and depressing is not the sort of thing…
If the life of filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., were fiction, set down more or less as Wood’s cronies tell it, it would be hailed as the great Hollywood satire. It would seem like a creation of Nathanael West, had he survived until the Fifties, or of Tom Robbins, had…
“There’s something happening here,” a Coral Gables gallery owner told me over lunch recently. “I’m just not sure what it is.” Me neither. The infusion of new blood into renovated South Beach, Miami’s growing reputation as a Latin American capital, local museum expansions, and the sudden arrival of a large…
On every level, Quiz Show is astonishing. It’s more than just a satisfying epic melodrama about the television scandals that rocked the broadcast industry almost 40 years ago; it’s the best American movie of 1994, and the most eloquent examination of the country’s contradictory sense of ethics since The Godfather…
Few movies pack as much potential for stirring up controversy as Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights. At heart it’s a traditional love story. But what sets Savage Nights (originally titled Les nuits fauves) apart is its topicality. Consider: Collard adapted the film (in French with English subtitles) from his autobiographical novel…
Redemption. Now there’s something I could use a little of. It’s been one of those weeks, man. Like any red-blooded American boy who ever played in little league, I experienced emotions I never thought were there when I heard about the cancellation of the baseball season. It was without a…
Reserve some time between September 21 and October 2, drive to the southernmost part of Florida, and experience the only significant gathering of new play productions, play readings, and theatrical workshops in this area. I’m referring, of course, to the Key West Theatre Festival. I could moan about the fact…
After successfully tackling the Bard in their first annual Shakespeare Festival, the plucky Florida Playwrights’ Theatre now presents something completely different, and does it almost as well. Graceland, by Ellen Byron, and Line, by Israel Horowitz, are two one-act plays that fit together perfectly and provide an evening of smart,…
Quentin Tarantino and I have something in common: We’re both movie nuts who once worked behind the counter in video stores. I can’t speak for Tarantino, but most of my customers were couples (or one member of a couple renting something that both would see). And in nearly every case…
