The Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale’s current big exhibition, “The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography,” seems to trend backward for the museum. It’s not a bad show, but it’s far from the caliber of the sweeping survey of American painting the museum presented a couple of years…
More than just the Hollywood “it” girl of the moment, Emma Stone is a real actress, and in The Help, she gets an ostentatious, Oscar-baiting big scene in which to prove it. Stone is, to borrow a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis’ Twitter account, thoroughly postempire — she doesn’t need…
There may be nothing as Old Hollywood as the narrative about a pretty girl summoning up a dose of pluck to triumph over adversity. And yet Brit Marling — the lithe, stunning cowriter and star of 2011 Sundance Film Festival hits Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, who gives…
Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play Dwayne and Travis, a duo of going-nowhere types who, on the advice of a stripper, decide to off Dwayne’s hard-assed, Lotto-winning ex-Marine of a dad and live off the inheritance. They need $100,000 up-front for the hit man, so Dwayne and Travis elect to…
After the death of legendary actress Joan Crawford, her daughter published a book that has gone down as one of the most unflattering tell-alls in history. Cristina Crawford alleged that her mother was an alcoholic, ruthlessly careerist and abusive, capable of attempted strangling, and prone to raging out when finding…
We know you love zombies. So do we. Which is why we’re mondo excited about the Promethean Theatre’s presentation of Song of the Living Dead: A Zombie Musical. (These are the same zany dramaturgs responsible for bringing Cannibal! The Musical and Evil Dead: The Musical to South Florida.) Song of…
The idea of seeing a play about AIDS might not, at first blush, seem like the most inviting experience. It’s a heavy topic, and the potential for cloying melodrama is high. Since its first appearance on Broadway in 1993, Angels in America has not only given life and humanity to…
A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars Jason Bateman as standard-issue anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. When sober, Dave begrudgingly tolerates Mitch’s wild-animal routine. One night, when both are drunk, Dave admits he’s secretly jealous…
Nina (Li Bingbing) is a Shanghai career girl who drops plans to move to New York when she learns her estranged bestie, Sophie (Gianna Jun), is in a coma. Soon Nina discovers the manuscript of a novel Sophie had been writing, which turns their long-term friendship (cemented as teens dancing…
So much petty drama has clouded the release of Michael Rapaport’s A Tribe Called Quest documentary. One version of the backstory casts the first-time director as a doofus actor wannabe who persuades the seminal but privately splintered hip-hop crew to participate in a consummate career doc. After two and a…
This posthumous world premiere by counterculture chronicler Ann Morrissette Davidon is an ambitious study of cultural oppression in a changing world. It’s set in 1962 in a secluded estate above the Hudson River, where playwright Lorraine Hansberry (Karen Stephens), still reaping the rewards of her groundbreaking Raisin in the Sun,…
Chitterling Heights is a play about two powerful black artists at the beginning of the civil rights era. And it’s about their bickering. The action unfolds at the country house of Lorraine Hansberry, famed author of Raisin in the Sun. Her guest is James Baldwin, a revolutionary writer who tackled…
Studio 18 has hit upon an interesting premise for an art exhibit: It’s taken works from 40 regional artists, including two New Times Best Of winners, and hung them side by side with reinterpretations of those works by the mentally handicapped, people with autism, cerebral palsy, and other such disorders…
In the first scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells Cal (Steve Carell), her high school sweetheart and husband of 20-plus years, that she wants a divorce. She goes on to mention that she had an affair with a coworker named Dave Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), at which point…
Not every Homo sapiens who sees Project Nim will be moved to pledge membership in PETA. Still, this documentary biopic of the ’70s chimp picked to endure an “experiment” in simian sign language and general neglect pulls human heartstrings as wrenchingly as any creature feature in the 45 years since…
Exposing a little-known piece of Holocaust history — the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested thousands of Jews in Paris in July 1942 — Sarah’s Key dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality. The film toggles between…
In museum parlance, a canned show is one that comes to a venue prepackaged, either from another institution or from a company that specializes in assembling and touring exhibitions. All that’s needed on the receiver’s end is a little curatorial know-how and some space and you’re ready to rock ‘n’…
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the first edition, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…
“Suburban malaise” they call it, and it’s the reason Long Island dental hygienist Laura (Jenna Fischer) self-soothes with afternoon Budweisers, jealously stews over her disparaging, workaholic husband (Chris O’Donnell), and lets her 12-year-old son (Daniel Yelsky) — a chubby ball of hormonal rage — walk all over her. An underdog…
For those who think Cirque du Soleil is a little too passé, there’s Cirque Éloize iD. There are still contortionists and hand-to-hand acrobatics and in-line skating, but there is also hip-hop, modern, and break dancing — all of this is done to an electronica soundtrack. Sixteen artists hail from seven…
After ten years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord…
Based on a typically heart-wrenching case study by Oliver Sacks, this admirably modest adaptation tells the story of Gabriel Sawyer (Lou Taylor Pucci), a homeless hippie whose burnout isn’t the product of drug abuse but a ballooning benign tumor that’s erased his memory. Institutionalized in the mid-1980s and rejoined with…
