There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a great movie, be it the horror that thrills you, the drama that moves you, or the romantic comedy that pretty much shapes the way you dream of falling in love. And it’s even more satisfying to occasionally get away from the big ol’…
The 2015-16 arts season is perhaps the biggest yet to stir things up in the 954. As the cultural scene grows each month with the increasingly popular FAT Village Artwalk and the emerging, contemporary arts explosion that is Art Fallout (led by the Girls’ Club and held annually in October),…
Miami’s art climate is changing rapidly, fueled not by hydrocarbons but by an ever-expanding global market hungry for the Magic City’s scene. With last year’s messy birth of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) — which acrimoniously broke away from the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami — Miami now…
As the fever of summer breaks in South Florida, locals emerge from their climate-controlled summer dens. As tourists and snowbirds flock back into town, season kicks into high gear with art, stage, music, community, and cultural events. Summer may be sleepy and slow, but there’s no shortage of things to…
1. “He meant well,” a ticket-buyer said, shuffling miserably out of a Thursday-night screening of Roland Emmerich’s calamitous Stonewall. “That’s got to count for something.” I don’t think that’s true. If those good intentions had counted, they might have inspired Emmerich not to trust himself to helm this fictionalized recounting…
The thrill of experiencing a Broadway musical production starts long before the actors take the stage. It begins the moment audience members take their seats on plush velvet chairs. The warm lights flicker off, and excited voices hush at the sound of the orchestra tuning its instruments. A few taps…
Michael Favata is one of those movie buffs who will give you a run for your money when it comes to discussing slasher flicks. Five minutes into our conversation, he says the cult-classic movie Godzilla isn’t even the technical name of the film. Apparently, the movie and beast are referred…
Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city-dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks to the country to spend a week with her best friend,…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer/director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is a quaint yellow building with stately palm trees and well-landscaped shrubbery. Usually, it’s the art inside that’s controversial — not the politics surrounding the place. But over the summer, Jane Hart, who had been curator for eight years and who was instrumental…
In 1985, Lupe Ontiveros played Rosalita, a clueless housekeeper who’s the butt of jokes made by 13-year-old Corey Feldman in The Goonies. In 1997, she played another housekeeper, who gets a door slammed in her face by Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. In her later years, she…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are—hurtful, hopeful, lovely, lonely and…
Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you…
Guerrilla medical experiments, liquid porn, mandatory class war, courtesy executions, amateur spiritualism — these comprise the futuristic, dystopian realities of the characters in Florida Atlantic University media professor and composer Joey Bargsten’s experimental, postmodern opera Anatomy of Melancholy. Completed in 2005 as an interactive, “do-it-yourself iPod opera,” the avant-garde performance…
For some people, “radical self-expression” might mean swapping out the Dockers for something less khaki. For others, it means driving to the middle of a Nevada desert with 50 gallons of water and a bus full of weird costumes — including the requisite birthday suit — for the annual, weeklong…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
