Rade Serbedzija, the actor who plays the doomed photojournalist Aleksander in Before the Rain, is quick to point out the irony of the powerful antiwar movie’s setting. The first major film about the ethnic conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia, Before the Rain takes place in Macedonia, which…
Writer-director J.F. Lawton is on the verge of creating a whole new subgenre of films: action movies for people who don’t really like action movies. Lawton authored the screenplay for 1992’s Under Siege, which accomplished the nearly impossible feat of making Steven Seagal look good. As a Cajun chef, no…
New ideas, new inventions, new fashions, new freedoms. A world on the verge of incredible medical and technological breakthroughs, yet still struggling with timeless bugaboos such as poverty, prejudice, and overpopulation. A rising tide of intolerance toward immigrants. Cynics, mystics, reactionaries, and charlatans vying for power, publicity, and pocket money…
The late Joseph Papp, visionary impresario and driving force behind the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, once said, “There will never be another A Chorus Line.” Indeed. First produced by the Shakespeare festival, A Chorus Line was handed over to Broadway entrepreneurs, and the money generated by…
“Trust and friendship. These are the things that matter, that help you on your way,” declares conservative accountant David Stephens in a heartfelt voice-over that opens the dark, demented Scottish comedy Shallow Grave. The statement will prove remarkably ironic. Helping David on his way are Alex, a glib newspaper reporter,…
Okay, I admit it. Sometimes, just like you civilian moviegoers, I succumb to the hype and convince myself to see a flick when I really should know better. For example, take the new Sean Connery vehicle, Just Cause. I like Connery because A) he is, was, and always will be…
Take an Italian widow, angry at her daughter, and a Jewish widow, clinging to her daughter. Add an unassuming rabbi and a recent widower vigorously into the sauce. Throw them together in a South Florida condominium and shake them all up. What do you get? A silly bedroom farce that,…
The polyglot makeup of Miami’s population shapes culture in a city where, increasingly, the performing arts, museums, and the presence of the film industry function as a draw for tourism, a tool for the renewal of depressed areas such as downtown, and, overall, a catalyst for improving the quality of…
The Pope Theatre Company’s saucy production of Eric Overmyer’s Dark Rapture begins with a killer scene that could turn the most hard-core devotee of movies and TV toward the pleasures of live theater. Two men collide at the edges of a cataclysmic fire in Northern California. Amid the slides, lights,…
You can’t get much of a feel for any of the films in Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three-colors trilogy from an examination of their respective plots. It would be like trying to guess the color of a man’s eyes by looking at his skeleton. Red is the final installment in…
Somebody please shoot me the next time I decide to attend a Herbert Ross movie. It seems like a century ago that the veteran hack made his best film, 1971’s Play It Again, Sam. And even then the picture’s success was undoubtedly attributable in greater measure to Woody Allen’s contributions…
Last year, my first as the movie reviewer here at New Times, the Miami Film Festival almost drove me crazy. I went berserk running to last-minute critics’ previews of festival offerings and fretting over the films I had yet to screen as my deadlines loomed. The logistics of transporting a…
Concurrent with Black History month, Florida Playwrights’ Theatre in Hollywood presents Sandra Fenichel Asher’s A Woman Called Truth, a staged biography of Sojourner Truth. Asher has fashioned an amalgam of dramatization, Sojourner’s own words, and period spirituals to tell the story of the inspirational nineteenth-century activist. The play opens at…
An extensive survey of works of art by Arab women, Forces of Change: Women Artists of the Arab World, currently can be seen at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus Centre Gallery and its InterAmerican Gallery in Little Havana. Organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington,…
The twelfth annual Miami Film Festival opens this Friday with local resident David Frankel’s sleek and smart Miami Rhapsody. Second-guessing the festival’s opening and closing selections has become an annual rite. I already have heard grumbling that a “deeper” film should have kicked off the schedule, something less facile and…
Men and women speak different languages. Many of us suspected this even before we read Deborah Tannen’s best seller You Just Don’t Understand, which documents the phenomenon. Even if her book brought no big surprises, it provided some comfort: Why hold ourselves responsible for a communication breakdown with the opposite…
On the last Friday of 1994, there were few visitors at the Center for the Fine Arts (CFA), and most of the staff was on holiday. Outside, near the bottom of the ramp leading to the esplanade of the Metro-Dade Cultural Center (which consists of the CFA, the main branch…
It’s a measure of the success of Roman Polanski’s screen adaption of Ariel Dorfman’s suspenseful, provocative play Death and the Maiden that by the end of the film one is not as troubled by the concept of WASP-y Sigourney Weaver playing a Latin woman named Paulina Escobar as by the…
Jean Genet is one of the bad boys of the Twentieth Century. Abandoned as an infant by his mother to the French public welfare system, he relished his position as a social outsider all his life and used his identities as homosexual, prostitute, thief, and prisoner as subject matter for…
On September 29, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly announced his support of a repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. armed forces. The public outcry was immediate. Opinion polls revealed a nation split fairly evenly on the subject. In January 1993, after taking office…
I have a number of bones to pick (sorry) with Demon Knight, a supposed horror movie from the perpetrators of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt anthology series. But the most damning criticism is the simplest: It just isn’t scary. Gross is another story. The filmmakers have trucked in barrels of…
Get out your leopard spandex and feather boas, your cigarette holders and gold lame, and go see Ruthless!, Joel Paley and Marvin Laird’s musical spoof at the Colony Theater that outcamps the campiest melodramas and show-biz films in the movie canon. But before you go, consider making a trip to…
