Film: Melanie Lynskey: You may have seen her in supporting roles in such movies as Up in the Air, Win Win or Perks of Being a Wallflower, but she finally gets a leading role in an independent film worth your attention called Hello, I Must Be Going, a Sundance Festival favorite that plays the Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park this week. Lynskey is the reason to see the flick, which … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 27-30
The story could easily be a crude Fox sitcom or a schmaltzy reality series: An Israeli newborn and a Palestinian newborn are switched during a bomb scare in Haifa, Israel, a fact that neither discovers until their 18th birthdays. Instead, in The Other Son, this programmatic, easily exploitable story is played with tender care, cultural awareness and fabled resonance by … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 20-21
The documentary Side by Side, which opened Friday and runs through this week at the Lake Worth Playhouse, is as inside-baseball as movies get. An unlikely passion project for narrator Keanu Reeves, this studious doc features Reeves interviewing countless directors, cinematographers, producers, editors and actors about the inexorable transition from 35mm celluloid to hi-def … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 13-14
Theater: Palm Beach Dramaworks opens its season this weekend with Talley’s Folly, Lanford Wilson’s 1979 two-person drama of disappointment, family history and desire. Brian Wallace stars as Matt Friedman, who has fallen in love with Sally Talley (Erin Joy Schmidt), and wants to make her his wife, despite objections from her Protestant family about an older Jewish suitor, and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 6-7
Art: Continuum, an exhibition in collaboration with Florida Atlantic University’s master of fine arts in visual arts program that features the artwork of 10 current graduate candidates and 10 alumni, is on display at the main gallery space of the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County in Lake Worth. The exhibition, which includes paintings, ceramics and photography as well as … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 29-Oct. 1
Film: It doesn’t happen often, but a movie like Looper demonstrates that a science fiction/action picture can also be smart. Set in 2044, with a believable visual concept of the near future just before time travel is invented. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises) plays a looper, a paid assassin who knocks off convicts and other bad guys sent back from 30 … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 22-23
Theater: This weekend, Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre offers the area premiere of Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman, in the new adaptation by, among others, Oscar and Tony Award winner Geoffrey Rush, who scored a personal performance triumph with the play in New York last season. Here, Ken Clement plays the lowly civil servant in tsarist St. Petersburg, teetering on the brink … [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. 8-9
Film: Now that journeyman actress Melissa Leo has won an Oscar (for The Fighter), she should gain the clout to get her films general distribution, but t hasn’t happened yet. That is why her first-rate performance as a drug-addicted mom struggling with submitting herself to a rehab clinic in Why Stop Now is opening locally at the Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park, even in this … [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...]