The Public Theatre of South Florida has spent the past several years in the unenviable role of Little Theater That Could, chugging gamely along, following its muse, and hemorrhaging cash all the while. In 2005, the Public mounted a massively ambitious season consisting mostly of heavy dramas like The Normal…
“The Peacock’s Feather: Male Jewelry of Old Japan” doesn’t actually contain any colorful plumage. It’s just a metaphor for how 18th- and 19th-century Japanese men called attention to themselves by displaying their finery (it’s only the male peacock that has those lovely feathers). The exhibit displays a fine selection of…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather…
Publisher: Atlus
Platform: Wii
Price: $49.99
ESRB Rating: T for Teen
Score: 8.5 (out of 10)
In the new Clint Eastwood movie, ordinary young men — husbands and fathers, artisans and aristocrats — are drafted into a war whose motives many of them do not fully understand. There, on an island called Iwo Jima, they fight against an enemy who has been demonized by wartime propaganda…
If you’re a tiny little theater with a tiny little budget, there is no better play to tackle than Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, by exiled Iranian playwright Assurbanipal Babilla. You need no sets, no props, no costumes. All that’s required is a director as perverse as Square Peg…
Take a look around you. Do it now — whether you’re at a café table, your work desk, your living room couch. How much of the everyday objects surrounding you could be considered art? “Objects of Design: Decorative Arts and Elements of Frank Lloyd Wright” shows that in the hands…
The Protector (Genius Products) Thailand’s Tony Jaa has made clear his plan to take Jackie Chan’s crown as the king of Holy crap, did he just do that?! He’s about halfway there. Though Jaa is devoid of Chan’s charisma, his hyperathletic kickboxing style will make your jaw drop; here’s a…
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Platform: Xbox 360
Price: $49.99
ESRB Rating: E (for Everyone)
Score: 9 (out of 10)
Clerks II (Weinstein) Council of the Gods (First Run) Die You Zombie Bastards (Image) Dreamland (Image) Employee of the Month (Lions Gate) Gridiron Gang (Sony) Grim Reaper (Lions Gate) Her Minor Thing (First Look) La Moustache (Koch Lorber) Lucky Number Slevin (Weinstein) Monroe: Class of ’76 (Image) Pulse (Weinstein) Rotation…
America’s Funniest Home Videos: Salute to Romance (Shout Factory) Behind the Mask (Good Times) Broken Bridges (Paramount) Color of the Cross (Fox) Conversations With Other Women (Hart Sharp) Crank (Lions Gate) Everybody Says I’m Fine (BFS) Good Morning World (S’More) Hello Kitty’s Animation Theater: Complete Collection (ADV) Live Nude Girls…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenaged girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity…
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best-known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-20th-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le merveilleux…
At face value, Alpha Dog — based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending — plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet: In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of…
Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou’s third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn’t much matter. Zhang’s interest in the wuxia (martial arts) film may well extend no further…
In August of this year, it will have been 45 years since Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a barbiturate overdose — nearly a decade longer than she was alive. Yet she remains as elusive and enigmatic a cultural icon as ever. If you doubt this, consider “Life as a…
Graham Flint’s mural-sized photographs aren’t just artistic — they’re scientific. That’s why they feel like portals to other places rather than mere photographic evidence that those places exist. It’s almost surreal. No mere virtual reality, the images provide a kind of meta-reality. In New York Cityscape at Night (2006), for…
Bandidas (Fox) This review is not long enough for a suitable treatment of the beauty of Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek. The makers of Bandidas would certainly prefer I tried, though, than to discuss this plodding cliché of a western featuring the two. You could write the script right now…
In the final year of Francis Biddle’s life, the then-unknown Joanna Glass took a job as his personal assistant and secretary. Decades later, Glass would transform her memories of that time into Trying, the play currently enjoying its SoFla premier at Palm Beach Dramaworks. If Trying is to be believed,…
By the time you graduate from college, you should know how to do a few important things… like sing your university’s fight song, do your own laundry, and ride a mechanical bull. In this last endeavor, Tequila Ranch (at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, One Seminole Way, Hollywood)…
War is hell, says Home of the Brave, and if you’re Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, so is acting. Fiddy gets a leg up from typecasting as Jamal Atkins, one of four demoralized veterans of Operation Enduring Fuckup, home from Iraq to a world of pain. How to handle back problems,…
