There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only…
There are myriad stories to tell in Miami. Two-bit fraud schemes, big-time drug smugglers, and quirky tales of immigrants in America add fodder to a screenwriter or director’s imagination. The city is, after all, a funky and cinematically appealing world to set a movie in. Add to that television shows…
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere ten best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux till the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal, Human…
Four of the top ten films I saw this year don’t actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in ’03, but I also make…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-nineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence, and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The first image most of us had of music and the Third Reich was watching each von Trapp tyke sing “auf Wiedersehen, good night,” bow off the stage, slip into the night, surmount a few low hurdles, and climb a couple of mountains to freedom. Loosely based on a true…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one…
What is it about the theater that attracts so many filmmakers? The actor’s paradoxical task — to tell the truth while pretending to be someone else — is usually at the heart of this fascination. Not a year goes by without a movie about actors and live performance, from big-studio…
In this age of celebrity and relentless hype, it’s hard to recall a time when dedicated, internationally renowned artists often lived and worked apart from the media’s gaze. That certainly was the case of Maya Deren, an influential filmmaker whose dreams had a profound influence on experimental cinema in the…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
“Can somebody pinch me,” requests director Wilkenson Bruna, nervously speaking moments before his first feature film, Wind of Desire, premieres at the Intracoastal Theater in North Miami Beach. “I’m still dreaming.” Before him, the seats are packed with the movers and shakers of Miami’s Haitian community dressed in their finest…
Christ is sexy. There, got your attention. But honestly, think about it: nice guy, pretty hair, carpentry skills, puts loaves (and fishes) on the table. Plus all that doing miracles and rising from the dead and being the Son of God business. Heck, he’d be a prime catch for any…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that…
Miami film fans have long complained about the difficulty in catching offbeat independent films. The local art house cinemas — the Cosford, Soyka, the Absinthe, Intracoastal, and the Miami-based microcinema group www.straightawaymovies.com — serve up indie fare, but many hot films never make it to South Florida and those that…
Miamians have been hearing the same promise for years: The city is a certifiable and important center for the arts. It is on the cusp of greatness, as far as an arts scene is concerned. The city has culture, with artists, musicians, and filmmakers of diverse backgrounds creating a new…
There’s no denying that U2 is awesome, nor that Phil Joanou is a snappy director, but the charming awkwardness of Sam Jones’s 16mm black-and-white rockumentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, makes one wanna murmur, “Rattle on? Humbug!” at the Irish Grammy-grabbers’ old-school cinematic self-celebration. As we turn our…
With Frida — the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo — it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of…
