Film: It is not exactly Martin Scorsese and Leo DiCaprio, or even the long-term collaboration between Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Kline, but emerging filmmaker Drake Doremus has made a second film with his muse, Felicity Jones. He follows up Like Crazy from a few years ago with the more accomplished Breathe In, the tale of an upstate New York family whose lives are disrupted by … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 24-26
Music: The jazz singer Kurt Elling famously turned away from a career in academia to reinvent himself as a vocalist, starting out at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill club while a graduate student and collaborating with pianist Laurence Hobgood. Late last year, the two musicians parted company to work on solo projects, and Elling is touring with his 1619 Broadway: The Brill … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 18-20
Film: Having delayed its opening until January, the month for dumping sub-par movies on the market, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will get no awards or be taken the least bit seriously, but this reboot of the franchise based on the late novelist Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst action hero is still pulse-racing entertainment, far better than expected. Chris Pine, the young Captain Kirk of … [Read more...]
PBC theaters, Maltz dominate 38th Carbonell nominations
Palm Beach County professional theaters, and particularly the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, dominated this year’s Carbonell Award nominations, which were announced Wednesday. Palm Beach companies received 62 nominations — nearly two-thirds of the total —followed by Miami-Dade with 28 and Broward with eight. The Maltz Jupiter Theatre, last year’s big winner, looks poised to have … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 26-27
Film: British director Steve McQueen is known for making films of brutality and excess, but now he has chosen a subject that matches his style. It is 12 Years a Slave, the fact-based saga of Solomon Northup, an African-American free man who lives with his family in upstate New York until he is lured to the nation’s capital, tricked into bondage and sold as a slave. The … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 26-28
Film: James Cromwell, a perpetual supporting player, gets the lead role in an impressive independent film called Still Mine, about a Canadian farmer battling to keep his farm afloat just as his wife of 61 years (Geneviève Bujold) begins drifting into dementia. A capable carpenter, he decides to downsize to a new home he will build himself, but that is how he runs into the brick … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Feb. 23-24
Film: A new film based on a magic realism-infused novel by Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima, focuses on a small boy, Antonio (Luke Ganalon), who is introduced to the spirit world by his grandmother, Ultima (Miriam Colon), who is sort of a witch doctor, a conjurer of spells and an alternative healer. The compelling, if disorienting film is directed by Carl Franklin, probably best … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: Feb. 9-10
Theater: If, like me, you were floored by Maureen Anderman in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ A Delicate Balance, you will not need much coaxing to see her in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley’s clash of wills between a suspicious nun and an affable priest (Jim Ballard) who she is convinced behaved inappropriately with a 12-year-old male student. And this … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 15-16
The durable Oklahoma oil hand-turned country singer Toby Keith is in town tonight at the Cruzan Amphitheatre, with the rising Brantley Gilbert as his opener. Keith’s Live in Overdrive tour should be extra-charged this week because of the ongoing attacks on the various U.S. embassies in Middle East hotspots after the Sept. 11 anniversary, one of which claimed the life of the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 1-2
Theater: Making an impressive debut is the new Island City Stage, which has arrived at Fort Lauderdale’s Empire Stage with the smart and twisty new play, The Twentieth Century Way by nimble wordsmith Tom Jacobson. The play is based on an actual incident from Long Beach, Calif., circa 1914, when out-of-work actors were employed in an elaborate sting operation to entrap local … [Read more...]