The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects — The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984) — had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which…
The Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., contains more than 13 million letters, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, press clippings, and other materials that document the lives and work of U.S. artists since the Eighteenth Century. Founded to preserve artists’ personal effects and make them available for research, the archive has…
thursday february 20 The Colored Museum: Florida International University’s theater department presents George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum as part of the school’s Black History Month celebration. The award-winning play, which premiered in 1986, is a double-edged spoof of black and white America. Tickets cost ten dollars. Performances run today…
Like a black Jay Gatsby with a bulging build, Muhammad Ali possessed a special radiance in his championship years that came from his ability to realize his wildest dreams. Nobody expected that his attention-grabbing line “I am the greatest” would prove to be the expression of a pride so enormous…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right, and I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie — not a dozen jammed-together entries of a…
Smallpox, cholera, and polio — diseases that a century ago killed or disabled hundreds of thousands of people — have all but been eliminated from the Western world by virtue of vaccinations, antibiotics, and improved sanitation. Such eradication has created an illusory sense of immunity among people in the First…
thursday february 13 Anti-Film Festival: For those who’ve had their fill of premiere parties and Top 40 soundtracks, Alliance Film/ Video Co-op offers a little art from emerging and experimental filmmakers and video artists. The fourth annual low-budget-film celebration at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) and the…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery, dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’s quietly atmospheric…
Move over, Medea. Drama’s quintessential bad mother, who killed her children to take revenge on her husband, has some serious competition in the title character of Nicholas Wright’s Mrs. Klein. Closely based on the controversial therapist known for her theories about child psychology, Wright’s Melanie Klein did not actually murder…
The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim is best-known for her Le Dejeuner en Fourrure, a teacup covered in fur that was included in a 1936 exhibition of surrealist works organized in Paris by Andre Breton. The suggestively erotic, delightfully improbable piece was the hit of the show. Purchased by the Museum…
thursday february 6 Miami Film Festival: The fourteenth annual Miami Film Festival continues its dominion over the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts (174 E. Flagler St.) tonight at 7:00 p.m. with American director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers and at 9:30 p.m. with Argentine director Mario Benedetti’s Wake Up, Love…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism, a primal moral pull. During the horrifying Mississippi flood of 1927, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a woman stuck in a cypress tree and a man clinging to…
The second half of the fourteenth Miami Film Festival, which concludes this Sunday, February 9, volleys from sweet (Argentina’s Wake Up, Love) to bittersweet (Spain’s Balseros), with most of the entries falling somewhere in between, including new releases from Richard (Slacker) Linklater and Stephen (My Beautiful Laundrette) Frears: subUrbia and…
Neil Simon has written 30 plays and numerous screenplays since 1960. Undeniably one of America’s most prolific writers, he is also one of the most abundantly produced. Four of his comedies ran simultaneously on Broadway during the 1966-67 season. Since last January six have been produced in South Florida alone…
Sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, the fourteenth Miami Film Festival (January 31 to February 9) corrals thirty-two full-length films and five shorts, including eleven U.S. premieres, from fourteen different nations. The mix, as usual, leans heavily on recent U.S. (six), Spanish (five), and Latin American (five) works, but also features the…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off as less the work of a wizard than the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws or…
In Jon Robin Baitz’s drama Three Hotels, the wife of a corporate executive delivers a speech to wives who are about to move to the Third World for the first time. Barbara Hoyle, whose husband’s company markets baby formula to mothers in developing nations, titles her talk “Be Careful.” She…
Susie T. Evans sweeps the fine dirt in front of her wooden bungalow every morning. She likes the ground smooth and packed firm. When she rests she sits on a bench fashioned from scrap wood and a rusty bucket. She collects the junk that accumulates along the paved road running…
thursday january 30 Miami RV Show: Consider it an anthropological expedition to a nomadic culture in which the highest value is attached to mobility (with comfort running a close second). It’s the wonderful world of recreational vehicles, as celebrated by the first annual Miami RV Show, taking place this weekend…
