After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with another biopic starring and executive-produced by Hilary Swank. As Conviction’s Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts high school dropout and single mom who put herself through law school to exonerate her brother, Kenny,…
Many artists long to have their own galleries. Broward-based photographer Jeremiah Jenner made it happen. First he applied for a space at the Sailboat Bend Artist Lofts, on the fringes of downtown Fort Lauderdale. Then he transformed that space into a combination residence, studio, and gallery. The latter, Galerie Jenner,…
For the past half-decade, Romain Duris has been French cinema’s go-to brooder. Diversifying his saturnine handsomeness, Duris gives his artfully disheveled brunet mop and permanent three-day stubble a workout in the overextended, hopped-up Heartbreaker, which puts the “antic” in romantic comedy. The premise of Heartbreaker, the first feature by TV…
A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary, Seth Gordon’s anthology Freakonomics pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s bestselling book of pop math and hands them to famous doc filmmakers to make their own. Gordon (King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts with…
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest — Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich) can spruce up any pulp. The original Warren Ellis comic — a straight-ahead tale about a retired company hit man named Frank Moses (played here by Bruce…
When was the last time you grooved on the work of a Croatian artist? If your answer, like mine, is “Never, that I can recall,” you can remedy the situation by visiting the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. That’s where “Sinisa Kukec: And Yet Another Wayward Landscape” is now…
We love Michael Jordan in Miami. So much so, in fact, that we took the extraordinary step of retiring his Airness’ jersey in our own arena, even though his only lasting legacy in our city was sweeping the Miami Heat out of its first playoff series in 1992. No worries…
Some people pride themselves on their ability to paint like Matisse. Others pride themselves on their ability to cook like Emeril Lagasse. And still others are proud of their ability to combine dialog like Hemingway’s with Chuck Palahniuk’s wit and sarcasm into a novel. The latter person is specifically Casey…
Saturday, the power of man over beast and the power over self will be on display. Stop at the round purple signs in downtown Fort Lauderdale and you will have found yourself at “Art Fallout 2010,” a large, inaugural, multivenue art event hosted by the Girl’s Club in which a…
Congratulations, Cincinnati; you’re home to the country’s largest Oktoberfest celebration. Too bad it also topped VH1’s list of the 40 least metal moments when Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil grand-marshaled the “Chicken Dance” in 2004. Well, you can bet your bratwurst there’ll be nothing like that at this year’s Rocktoberfest at…
Being forced to hide your Jewish heritage, convert to Catholicism, and change your last name probably doesn’t sound funny to most people, but for Frannie Sheridan, the best way to deal with personal tragedy is to poke fun at it. After narrowly escaping the Holocaust and then a brutal, anti-Semitic…
When murder rates took a sudden dip in the ’90s, it had nothing to do with stricter gun-control laws or more police presence. The lower rate was a direct result of legalizing abortion in 1973. According to the authors of bestseller Freakonomics, criminals are often born into the same troubled…
If you’ve been in Fort Lauderdale longer than 24 hours, you’ve probably come across the name Stranahan. In fact, if you grew up here, you’ve likely been on a field trip to the Stranahan House in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale and heard the story of how one day…
When Sarah Jones was writing her one-woman show Bridge and Tunnel, she made the New York City subway line something like her mobile study hall. There, she analyzed the characters who traveled into Manhattan from the largely ethically diverse immigrant communities of the surrounding outer burroughs, often nicknamed (both lovingly…
Folks looking longingly at their $1 PBR tallboys is a recurring theme of the night at Flaunt Thursdays. The endless stream of skinny jeans and dresses lead you to a dance floor where 20-something bodies are grinding, shaking, and gyrating. People are dancing on the couch cushions. It gets as…
Show of hands here: Do you think the World Wide Web is more smitten with boobs or with cats? Surely, at least, those twin titans of online traffic have remarkably separate target audiences. Hell, some of the biggest fans of cats might not even be online yet. How in the…
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…
Davis Guggenheim’s call-to-arms documentary on the failures of the U.S. public-education system — thoroughly laudable in intention if maddening in its logic and omissions — originated with his own guilty conscience. An Academy Award winner for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, the director, whose debut doc, 2001’s The First Year, heralded…
SyFy Network house director Steven R. Monroe remakes Meir Zarchi’s 1978 quintessential revenge-rape/rape-revenge film. Jennifer (Sarah Butler) rents a cabin in black-mud, backwoods Louisiana to work in peace on her second novel. An encounter with a local gas-station attendant (Jeff Branson) that crackles with class anxiety starts him and his…
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off — in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has been in years. De Niro is Jack, a prison corrections officer who, abandoning all professional and common sense, foolishly screws himself by screwing Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), the wife of corn-rowed…
Set up on a blind date by their married best friends, Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel) show each other the worst of themselves. (“You look like you read,” he says disparagingly. Trust me, she doesn’t.) They separate in a huff before making it to dinner. Soon, the best…
Horses make lousy protagonists, what with their inability to speak, emote, or do much of anything other than run or stand around. No surprise, then, that Secretariat employs its subject as merely a vehicle for a human victory-over-adversity story, which, in this based-on-real-events case, involves owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane)…
