A scene from A Town Called Panic.By John Thomason You can pay half-attention to A Town Called Panic and still be able to follow the story. You can just as easily pay complete attention and have no idea what's going on. Bottom line: Just leave logic at the door and try and enjoy yourself.Opening Friday at the Lake Worth Playhouse, the film is based on a long-running Belgian … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘The Maid,’ compelling portrait of a breakdown
Catalina Saavedra in The Maid.By John ThomasonSevere mental illness or run-of-the-mill midlife crisis?This is the debate posed by Sebastian Silva’s The Maid, which opens Friday in Lake Worth and Lake Park. This compelling Chilean drama, which won a jury prize at Sundance last year, explores a character of complex interiority: a dowdy, middle-aged, live-in maid for an … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘Paris’ a gripping mediation on darkness, not light
Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris in Paris.By John ThomasonReading the cliché-riddled description of Paris on the Website of the Lake Worth Playhouse, where the film opens Friday, you may want to roll your eyes.This “valentine to the city of lights” is a “cinematic love letter to a city that seems to hide a story behind every shop window, small alley, street market or grand … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘Tetro’ marks Coppola’s return to youthful form
Vincent Gallo in Tetro.By John ThomasonIf Tetro is the 70-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s final film, it would be an elegant swan song to an accomplished career: an invigorating inhalation of arthouse air to remedy the commercial drudge work to which the director confined himself in the ‘90s.Indeed, the Francis Coppola of the late half of the late ‘00s harkens more to his … [Read more...]
Film review: Frank tale of elder love stumbles on routine plot
Ursula Werner and Horst Westphal in Cloud 9.By John Thomason[This review has been updated to correct a factual error.] Even as statistic after statistic shows that senior citizens fornicate just about as much as the rest of us, showing sex among elders remains taboo in American film and TV.If not found under the “educational” auspices of HBO’s Real Sex, senior citizen flesh is … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘Afghan Star’ explores gap between pop stardom, repression
Contestant Lima Sahar in a scene from Afghan Star.By John ThomasonAbout halfway through her new documentary Afghan Star, British filmmaker Havana Marking finds an image that best expresses the confused, artificial progress of post-Taliban Afghanistan: A woman, completely covered by a burqa, snaps a photo of a wannabe pop star with her cellphone. For a movie about modern, … [Read more...]
Theater feature: Lake Worth’s Tomé brings ‘Babylon’ home, then Off-Broadway
Gregg Tomé in Back to Babylon.By Hap ErsteinActor-writer Gregg Tomé is nothing if not persistent. For over a decade he has been writing, revising and performing his one-man show, Back to Babylon, his memory play of growing up in the Long Island town that draws tongue-in-cheek parallels to the Biblical city of the same name.Although many of the nine characters he becomes -- … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘Gigantic’ a sometimes amusing essay in indie quirk
Zooey Deschanel as Happy in Gigantic.By John ThomasonThe minute we hear that Zooey Deschanel’s character in Gigantic is introduced with the name Happy (short for Harriet), our collective bell goes off.Conditioned by too many quirky independent comedies, the irony of her secretly miserable life has already cemented in our craniums so thoroughly that it can almost no longer apply … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 1-May 3
Ranchos Church 1 (1929), by Georgia O'Keeffe. As the season evaporates, several important shows are closing this weekend or in the next few days:Art: Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. An important show of paintings and photographs by two leading American landscape artists, which ArtsPaper's Katie Deits said in … [Read more...]
Film review: ‘Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema’ brings Freud to movie house
Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rosselliniin David Lynch's Blue Velvet.By Hap Erstein If you have not yet discovered the tiny Emerging Cinemas in Lake Worth, the digitally projected repertory art film theater next door to the Lake Worth Playhouse, this is the month to do so. Opening on Friday and playing for a week is the provocatively titled The Pervert’s Guide to … [Read more...]