In a hilarious New Yorker cartoon sent out via newsletter earlier this month, a woman and her dog sit across from one another enjoying dinner at an upscale restaurant. Both sip wine as a vague city outline peeks through a window, providing a swanky background touch to an evening out…
In what may have been the most prescient theatrical adaptation in years, playwright David Mamet revived the 1905 work The Voysey Inheritance in 2005, four years before Bernie Madoff pled guilty to 11 federal offenses including securities fraud and money laundering. The play, a fusion of Wall Street-style financial drama…
Summer is tough on Floridians. Months of sprinting from one pocket of air conditioning to another can crush your soul. Fortunately, one festival is set to revive it: Today’s Grace Jamaican Jerk Festival packs in enough slow-cooked love to shift your EKG reading from sluggish to Soca. While the temperature…
South African contemporary artist William Kentridge made Time’s list of “100 Most Influential People” this year. However, being listed among such heavy hitters as Hillary Clinton, The Twitter Guys, and Paul Krugman wasn’t the most impressive part. The person who wrote the item that gushes praise for the artist is…
You adore the feeling of having your feet planted firmly on the wax, riding a surfboard, and allowing a wave to cradle you as you slide toward the shore. It’s a feeling akin to flying. That is, flying with water spraying in your face and the threat of falling off…
The reality of Catholic high school tarnishes the dream of Catholic high school. The reality is that priests and nuns are sober, restrained elders with stern humors. If you were spanked, you didn’t enjoy the chastisement. If a nun was nasty, it wasn’t referring to the new positive spin on…
Michael Israel, a strapping Yanni lookalike, is what you might call a speed painter. To songs like “Pump it Up,” he jumps around on stage, splattering a spinning canvas with paints. For the first few minutes his brushstrokes don’t seem to add up, but by the fifth minute a pop-art…
It sounds like a Kit Kat commercial: A group of construction workers, bored at work, one by one begin to dance before breaking out in a flurry of footwork. But suppose these “workers” are Australian, and their form of dance is tap. In that case, there’s obviously no chocolate snacks…
New Orleans has always been a bit of a melting pot. From language to food to culture, it’s a place where combination and commingling are the rule rather than the exception. This fact is as true of New Orleans’ musical history as of anything else, and few bands encapsulate the…
If you’re in Homestead and catch a whiff of barbeque and charcoal wafting through the air, chances are you’re at Ribfest. This Saturday and Sunday, local grilling experts will take to the outdoors for two days of ribs, motorcycles, grills and entertainment while the country side of South Florida comes…
The Paris-born Sleepless Night seems tailor-made for a town like Miami Beach, where hotel rooms are just a secure place to store your bags. This Saturday, the all-night celebration is back with 150 free cultural events from Mid Beach down to the Pointe. Trying to hit them all is futile,…
The Lilith Fair has officially announced 18 dates for 2010, none of which include South Florida. But for the last three years, we’ve had our own all-women’s music fest. FemmeFest has hosted xx-staples like Zombies! Organize!!, Astari Nite, and The State Of in the past. This year the two-day fest…
The Lilith Fair has officially announced 18 dates for 2010, none of which include South Florida. But for the last three years, we’ve had our own all-women’s music fest. FemmeFest has hosted xx-staples like Zombies! Organize!!, Astari Nite, and The State Of in the past. This year the two-day fest…
Perhaps now isn’t the best time to be singing the praises of public art, considering that the Broward County Commission recently suspended its Public Art and Design program because of budget cuts. Tell that to the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, which is currently showcasing “Natural Forces: Broward County…
Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education is a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center. Based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education arrives in cinemas at a curious moment indeed for a movie about a headstrong 16-year-old who gives herself to…
We call it soccer, but for the Brits, it’s football, and it’s damned serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly…
Chess hasn’t been this sexy or subversive since The Thomas Crown Affair. A French film directed by Caroline Bottaro, Queen to Play follows a middle-aged hotel maid Hellene (Sandrine Bonnaire) who, after seeing a couple engage in some seriously, sexually tense chess on their hotel balcony, decides to take up…
Ah, the Matthew Broderick stoner movie. Ferris Bueller all grown up, divorced, disappointed, a weekend father, looking chubby and unshaven, waking and baking in a squalid apartment he shares with a cheerful Senegalese roomie (Michael K. Williams). Weaned on Neil Simon plays, Broderick has always been a much better actor…
For a while, there really were only two known Jews living in Afghanistan. Their names were Isaac Levin and Zebulon Simentov, and they hated each other. Documentary footage shot in the wake of the 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime shows two men driven through their long, lonely, and largely…
Less documentary than closely and manipulatively edited homage to the new-agey “genius” of frequent Michael Jackson collaborator and High School Musical auteur Kenny Ortega, This Is It is about as honest as the song it’s named after—which was co-written with and then stolen from Paul Anka in 1983, sold to…
Cody Unser became paralyzed in 1999 when her immune system attacked her spinal cord. She developed an intense headache, and numbness crept up from her legs to her hips and finally to her chest, all in under an hour. The symptoms were part of an uncommon neurological disorder called transverse…
It takes considerable effort to make Darren Aronofsky seem like a model of restraint, but Robert Siegel pulls it off in Big Fan. Siegel’s screenplay for The Wrestler insisted on beating down Mickey Rourke at every turn, but Rourke’s performance and Aronofsky’s grounding direction fended off the almost comically over-the-top…
