The Indestructible Lee Miller” is perhaps an ironic title for NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s latest exhibition. Following the career of Elizabeth “Lee” Miller (1907-77), the Vogue model turned World War II photographer, the exhibit is, in fact, filled with destruction. Black-and-white photographs of the demolition of Europe and the…
Intelligent and well-designed public art has the power to beautify a city, drawing people outside and, perhaps, to hang out for a while. In our car-obsessed culture, the mere thought of a brisk walk might not make sense, especially in South Florida, where many streets lack sidewalks, bike lanes, and…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s 20-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
Acronyms, who doesn’t love them? And this year there’s a new one to learn as the Miami LGBT Film festival officially merges its name with the Fort Lauderdale edition to become MiFo – the Miami-Fort Lauderdale LGBT Film Festival. Formerly the Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, MiFo has…
Perhaps one of the most anticipated Broadway shows to come through South Florida this year is the musical about two unexpecting lovers, Once. What originated as a 2006 Irish film was later adapted into a 2012 Tony-winning musical performed on stage with a cast that can not only sing but…
Is there a better way to spend your Saturday than with a bunch of geeks dressed head to toe in painfully-detailed costumes surrounded by sci-fi, occult, video game, and cartoon memorabilia? Literally none. That is the best thing. Luckily, I got my chance to do just that at the first-annual…
A documentary about a magazine is doomed never to capture the thing it’s documenting. The best that can be said for Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is that it captures, at times, the heady disbelief of paging through its subject, the National Lampoon, the headwaters of much of American…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen — the…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were, like, just ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
As the stifling heat of summer finally begins to break and our extended daylight hours diminish, most of us have already been forced to admit what the impending onslaught of Starbucks #PSLs and flamboyant grocery store Halloween displays will shortly set in stone: Summer is over. It’s time to get…
When a lady Darth Vader and an overweight Batman are sharing a Diet Coke and a cigarette, there can only be one of two explanations: Either some interesting life choices were made or there’s a comic con in town. This past weekend, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Broward Convention Center hosted…
For die-hard Lord of the Rings fans, the pinnacle of existence is meeting one of the nine members of the fellowship of the ring. On the convention circuit, Sean Astin — who played hobbit Samwise Gamgee — is constantly approached by fans wearing prosthetic elvish ears. Some of them ask…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
In the mid-20th Century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
