Renowned Brazilian director Carlos Diegues has attempted to make a movie worthy of the music that has provided his nation with a soundtrack for the past century. But Diegues’s samba-inspired Orfeu doesn’t prove a very good dance partner. Like the floor charts sold to North Americans eager to learn the…
In 1992 fifteen acres of Miami-Dade parkland was designated as the Women’s Park. It was intentionally dubbed somewhat generically, explains Roxcy Bolton, the project’s visionary, so that “every woman would have a park … [a] special place. Women aren’t often remembered,” observes Bolton, an outspoken activist for gender equality in…
In the small bars and cafés of mid-1950s Rio de Janeiro, cool jazz-inspired samba musicians were experimenting. The result: the mellow mix known as bossa nova music, which literally means the new wave in Portuguese. The bohemian fusion of sweet melodies over a gentle rhythm with smooth vocals has become…
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
We enjoy a classic whodunit in the same way we enjoy Christmas carolers: with a certain amused detachment. We are not seeking new insight into the human condition but instead are indulging in a bit of nostalgic escapism. Thus, if the revival of a genre piece like Ira Levin’s classic…
It’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival time again: Time for more than 100 movies from dozens of countries. Time for screenings at locations from southern Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade’s South Beach. Time for foreign and domestic features, documentaries, and short subjects, along with the affiliated parties and other festivities…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence in ethnic conflict. Other…
In Spanish girar means both to go on tour and to spin around. Currently on the road with the show Girados, Ana Torroja and Miguel Bosé have put a new spin on the comeback tour. Long the golden boy of Spanish pop, 47-year-old Bosé has released seventeen solo albums since…
Do you have latent supernatural urges? Craving a bit of that old-time religion? Afraid if you don that ratty bunny suit again for yet another year of bar hopping on South Beach, you’re going to chew your paws off? Well, have no fear, something Wiccan this way comes: a refreshingly…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
When you walk into the Miami Light Project’s theater space, you will find yourself momentarily onstage. The space is set up so the stage has its back to those entering; you have to walk through it to get to the chairs. There’s a sensation of getting lost backstage and accidentally…
American Art Today: Fantasies and Curiosities” at the Art Museum at Florida International University is a rich and well-crafted show. Director Dahlia Morgan has explored the idea of the fantastic in art, the so-called uncanny, which seldom is addressed in today’s often faddish and overly didactic curatorial establishments. Not to…
The past month or so hasn’t been good for the local film scene. The death of the venerable Alliance Cinema in South Beach was a decided blow to independent film programming in South Florida. Combined with a few months without much film festival activity or many special screenings, the area’s…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race, or his controversial stances, or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
You know about Friday night: end of the week, beginning of the weekend, the day millions of workers all over the nation indulge in happy hours, the night where if you have nothing to do, you can pretty much consider yourself a loser. Well, even if you don’t have a…
“Hasta la vista, buggies!” boldly declares pixilated pixie Phig (voiced by annoyingly perky TV sitcom star Jenna Elfman), who’s part Tank Girl, part Judy Jetson. She’s literally referring to computer bugs in the Galleria Animatica software, version 3.0, the program she’s supposed to demonstrate for viewers in the IMAX 3-D…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-color taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Somewhere near the halfway mark of The Broken-Hearts Club, the latest gay romantic comedy (they really seem to be piling up these days) comes a not-unexpected scene where a rock-solidly avuncular older man (John Mahoney) tells a tremulously insecure younger one (Ben Weber) the “message” that’s at this film’s core:…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
The folks at the Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL) repeatedly use words like tackle and full contact in their press releases. They want you to know their players — Olympians, weightlifters, and other athletic types — “have the desire to hit.” They want you to know this is no girlie…
