By Dale King Delray Beach Playhouse continues to hitch its wagon to Neil Simon’s star as it opens its 69th season with the famed playwright’s first Broadway comedy hit, Come Blow Your Horn. It closes with a matinee Sunday. The Playhouse closed its 2014-2015 season with back-to-back Simon works: They’re Playing our Song, the Marvin Hamlisch-Carol Bayer Sager collaboration … [Read more...]
The View From Home 73: Kieslowski, Lumet and Loach, with a Bujalski indie, a repressed maid, and a true-crime one-off
Blind Chance: Completed in 1981, promptly censored by Polish authorities for its alleged political radicalism, and subsequently shelved for six years, Kryzystof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (Criterion, $26.19 Blu-ray, $22.99 DVD) is an astonishing work whose moral and ethical ideas, juggled like so many magicians’ balls, anticipate his ambitious breakthrough, The Decalogue. … [Read more...]
‘99 Homes’: The sharks of the downturn, grippingly rendered
Rick Carver is a perfect villain for the cutthroat housing market of 21st century. The antagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes is a vulture feasting on the carcass of the American Dream — and like his pinpoint-perfect surname suggests, he carves up the largest portions for himself. As played by Michael Shannon in a crude, rapacious 180 from his compassionate cop in the LGBT … [Read more...]
Film celebrates a philanthropist who changed black education
Julius Rosenwald. Do not feel bad if you cannot identify the name. Filmmaker Aviva Kempner, who focuses on the Chicago retail mogul and philanthropist who donated over $62 million to benefit African-Americans throughout the South, estimates that eight out of 10 people who see Rosenwald know little about the man who is its subject. “I think it’s the most inspiring story of … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in Broward art
By Michael Mills For years Broward County was the Rodney Dangerfield of the South Florida art world — little to no respect, especially compared with the hoitier-toitier art scenes of Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. No more. Museums have been reinvigorated with new leadership, galleries have popped up in sometimes unlikely places, and art walks are thriving in a handful … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in theater
The season, in geographic order, from Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade, kicks off at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre with that Agatha Christie chestnut The Mousetrap, based on her Ten Little Indians, the serial murder mystery that had a record-breaking run in London’s West End (Oct. 25-Nov. 8). Then, with most of its audience back in the area, it rolls out a pair of mega-musicals, … [Read more...]
Arts season preview 2015-16: The fall in film
Fanboys have been circling Dec. 18 on their calendars for more than a year, salivating over the arrival date of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (a/k/a Episode VII). It will surely dominate the year-end box office, no matter how much it satisfies or disappoints moviegoers. So it is OK if, like us, you are more interested in festival fare and awards fodder like Carol, Joy, The … [Read more...]
‘The Martian’: Breezy chronicle of the can-do spirit
Mars is hot right now. For mega-rich space cowboys like Elon Musk and Bas Lansdorp, the fourth rock from the sun is their next frontier, their Xanadu, their far-flung solution to climate change. But the founders of SpaceX and Mars One are not alone: Thousands have already applied for private space missions some 20 or 30 years down the line, even if it means never returning to … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 12-13
Film: Within every great comic is a dramatic actor yearning to break through. Or that’s how the show business cliché goes. But it is true about Lily Tomlin, who gives a remarkable, tough, smart-mouthed performance in a brief – only 78 minutes – low-budget film called simply Grandma. She is Elle, a lesbian poet whose granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), arrives on her Van Nuys … [Read more...]
Shyamalan’s ‘The Visit’ inspired, creepy and hilarious
Near the beginning of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, on a train en route to a weeklong stay with grandparents they’ve never met, 15-year-old Becca (Olivia De Jonge) and her 13-year-old brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) discuss the worst possible scenarios. “What if they’re scrapbookers?” “What if they think boy bands are cute?” Shotguns, butcher knives, and inexplicable projectile … [Read more...]