The effortless charisma of Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, the headliners of the first two Barbershop movies (released in 2002 and 2004), helped keep those over-plotted comedies buoyant. Cube and Cedric are back as Calvin and Eddie in Barbershop: The Next Cut, but even their enormous appeal can’t rescue…
Thursday, April 14 Not quite a guitar and certainly not a violin, the ukulele is a part of the family of instruments with strings that can be plucked that run in a plane parallel to the sound table. The ukulele itself took on a life of its own in Hawaii,…
ArtsUP is the latest addition to the increasingly popular FAT Village in downtown Fort Lauderdale. This unique gallery brings high-quality art installations to a new level — specifically, the level that starts at 12 feet overhead and goes up to the much-higher ceiling. Neil Ramsay, founder and director of the…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, intimate relations with Marion Cotillard lead one character to a spiritual awakening. Later, protagonist Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) declaims on what he considers “the one pleasure” that will never go away in life: “the surprise when I…
Here’s about as convincing an argument as I can imagine for the existence of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm. It’s been billed as a live-action remake (it’s too good to be called a…
Here’s a question faced by the creators of almost every superhero adaptation: How do do you pull this off without copying Frank Miller’s Batman? Too many modern superhero dramas — including the Dark Knight films, Arrow, Daredevil and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — either ape the dour realism…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
The Chet Baker portrayed by Ethan Hawke in Robert Budreau’s misty biopic Born to Be Blue is midway between beauty and ruin. Behind him are the 1950s, when his easy virtuosity and matinee-idol looks swiftly took Baker from Charlie Parker’s sideman to major player on Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label…
Maybe you’ve noticed, but the temperature has officially begun to rise to back to a familiar South Florida levels of sweltering with a side of humidity. Must be beach season! Well, every season in South Florida is beach season, but peak beach season is close. That means it’s time to…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
Thursday, April 7 The vagaries of air travel have provided more material for more comedians than any subject this side of relationships. But few funnymen have actually worked in the business of takeoffs and landings. Atlanta native Arnez Z’s comedy career began, unofficially, in his prior post as a flight…
“Write what you know.” This is perhaps the most oft-repeated advice to anyone who’s every hammered away at a keyboard. So when Brittany Ackerman set out to develop a screenplay set in the city where she hangs out, one aspect of it was dominant: the drug and alcohol recovery industry…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
Superhero fans may not know stunt coordinator Philip J Silvera’s name, but they do know his work. Silvera’s choreography turned heads in such recent comic-book adaptations as the Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins Batman video games, the record-breaking Deadpool film and Netflix’s Daredevil. Silvera’s imaginative, brutal work on Daredevil’s first…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
YogaFest returns to downtown Fort Lauderdale downward facing dogs, pigeon poses, and plenty of shavasanas. (That’s corpse pose. You lie down. It’s the best pose.) The April 2 event at Fort Lauderdale’s Huizenga Plaza will feature one class after another, starting at 10 a.m. The festivities will continue until 9 p.m., and the…
Thursday, March 31 For whatever reason, art and beverages go hand in hand. Maybe it’s a way to cope with the emotions provoked by evocative work. Maybe the stimulating conversation has a parching effect on the throat. Maybe it’s a physiological response to deep thought. Or, it could be that…
Forget David Beckham and his endless teasing down in Miami. We already have soccer in South Florida; a proper, professional soccer team with a long history and some winning ways. Meet the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Broward County’s premier soccer team. The Strikers play in the North American Soccer League (NASL),…
Margaret Cho’s comedy always shines when she covers two subjects in particular: gay issues and her Korean-immigrant mother. Put them together and she slays. Cho perfectly captures her mom’s naive, old-school attitude as it plays out against Cho, an openly bisexual woman who grew up in ultraliberal San Francisco. In…
Drone warfare is a moral grey area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it…
Willful ignorance as a character trait typically evokes annoyance in those who witness it — at least in real life. In many French films, however, a character who’s willfully ignorant is portrayed in the twee manner, encouraging us to believe it is their blissful view of the world we should…
