Film: So you’ve already seen Ocean’s 8 and you are still craving a good heist film? Check out American Animals, a fact-based tale of a quartet of college students who have seen too many movies and decide to pull off an impossible robbery, stealing a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America – valued at millions of dollars – from the library at Transylvania (Ky.) University. Although … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 9-10
Film: I have rarely recommended a horror film, but Ari Aster’s directing debut, Hereditary, is so creepy good, with a stunning central performance by Toni Collette, that it exceeds the genre. She plays a woman disturbed by the recent death of her mother, whose genes have apparently infected the family and set in motion a series of tragedies. When her stoner son reluctantly … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: May 19-20
Film: While The Avengers and Deadpool 2 duke it out for the box office booty, see instead a small, human unconventional love story with no superheroes. It is called Anything – OK, a terrible, generic title – but it concerns a recent widower in Mississippi (John Carroll Lynch) who moves to Los Angeles at the urging of his meddlesome sister (Maura Tierney), and settles in tawdry … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 12-13
Film: So you want to take your mom to the movies for Mother’s Day, but she has already seen the Avengers flick? Boy, have we got a deal for you. This Sunday at 10 a.m., there will be free screenings of a sing-along version of Mamma Mia!, the ripoff of Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell with songs by the Swedish rock group ABBA. It is happening all across the country, but the South … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: April 20-22
Film: With such a benign title as A Bag of Marbles, you might not suspect that the film attached to it is a danger-laced Holocaust tale of two young Jewish boys, sent off by themselves by their French parents – a barber and a violinist – to cross the country to relative freedom in Nice, eluding the occupying Nazis. With tough-love brutality, the boys’ father beats into them … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 24-25
Theater: Broward Stage Door Theatre, which moves from Margate to its new permanent home in Lauderhill this August, is an erratic producer of musicals. But like the girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead, when the company is good, it is very, very good. As it is with its current mainstage show, Nice Work if You Can Get It, another Gershwin jukebox musical in the style of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 17-18
Film: Love, Simon is a fairly conventional coming-of-age story about a high school senior, except that he is unapologetically gay and – once he comes out to them – his friends and family are uniformly supportive of his sexual orientation. That makes for a lack of dramatic conflict, but still the film is surely a first by a major studio (Fox 2000). The only pushback comes from a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Feb. 10-11
Film: The Donald Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival concludes this Sunday evening with an exceedingly clever documentary about the many Jewish composers and lyricists who wrote our most popular, secular Christmas carols. You know about Irving Berlin penning “White Christmas,” but what about Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Song” – a string of winter images including chestnuts … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Jan. 12-14
Music: Renée Fleming sang her last Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera last year, but she hasn’t left off performing. Tomorrow night she returns to South Florida for a recital program with pianist Gerald Martin Moore at the Kravis Center. A couple years back she appeared at the Festival of the Arts Boca and featured rare verismo arias, and in previous iterations of this … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Dec. 15-17
Music: Just as you can’t escape the Nutcracker at dance concerts at this time of year, you’re not going to be able to get through the season with encountering part of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, an oratorio written originally for a children’s hospital benefit in Dublin for Easter in 1742. It was a great success, and has been a regular feature of concert programs ever … [Read more...]