The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his 1997 L.A. Confidential screenplay (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt The…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts the part of a real-life criminal chieftain — Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill…
A woman in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile makes this comment about the famous painter: “He says that occasionally there is a ‘Picasso’ and he is him.” You can substitute the word genius for Picasso and get the sense of what this phrase means. The comedy appears to…
thursday january 28 Fans of offbeat independent cinema take note. John Waters, the man who brought you the wonderfully heartwarming flicks Ping Flamingos, Polyester, Lust in the Dust, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and most recently, Pecker, is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast on cable’s Independent Film Channel…
There’s only one spot in South Florida where on any weekend from January to mid-March you can catch acts such as Cheap Trick, Air Supply, or Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and it’s not the Button South. It’s the unlikely locale of Gulfstream Park. “We’re selling a day of entertainment,”…
Ellie Schneiderman surveys her sanctuary, which sprawls across the third floor of one of South Florida’s most aberrantly designed malls and proclaims that “architecture is the mother of all art.” In this scenario it should be added that paradox is the mother of all human endeavor. The black-clad, black-haired artist…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Imagine you’re watching an early play by an obscure playwright — say, a farce with a plot that’s difficult to take seriously. Perhaps it contains a case of mistaken identity, at least one sharp-tongued female character, and some confusion about the proper nature of marriage. Say the conflicts are resolved,…
“If you don’t have a sense of humor, get off the stage!” So declares performance poet Taylor Mali in the movie SlamNation, opening this Thursday at the Alliance Cinema. The charismatic Mali is one of many memorable stars of the film, which generally chronicles the fierce competition between the colorful…
A philosopher/scholar named Jelaluddin Rumi has a chance encounter with an itinerant dervish named Shams of Tabriz. They form an abiding friendship, a profound bond that transcends their meeting in a thirteenth-century Turkish marketplace and extends to the world at the end of the millennium. How do we know this?…
thursday january 21 You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate klezmer music. The bleating, high-energy sound that was once the province of Eastern European Jews is now being embraced by a variety of listeners. Witness the popularity of bands such as the Klezmatics, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, and…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two — in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense — and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the hazards of Hollywood “disease” movies: false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclaim, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sings Kris Kristofferson in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Add the late Tallulah Bankhead to the list of middle-age women throwing themselves into the national political fray this year. The celebrated actress, as currently portrayed in the American premiere of Tallulah by movie star Kathleen Turner, has even less bona fide political experience than either Liddy Dole or Hillary…
With the countdown to the millennium under way, those looking for a place to ponder the ebb of the Twentieth Century would do well to visit the Rubell Family Collection, where a new exhibition by some of the most important modern and contemporary artists is on display. For its congruence…
thursday january 14 Once an arena for lively debate (and the occasional amusing verbal slugfest), America’s oldest liberal political periodical, the Nation, has been suffering from a clipped left wing the past few years. At fault: catering to the mainstream in a push for profits. And what to do if…
Six stages, more than 50 performers, and a fiercely competitive songwriting contest. Yes, there’s a bit more to the South Florida Folk Festival than a bunch of aging hippies sitting around the campfire in their sandals, strumming “Kum Ba Ya” on their guitars. Now in its eighth year, the two-day…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters carrying an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
