Miami’s film community is on fire. From big festivals to international screenings, local filmmakers are making waves, and indie heavyweight Sundance is taking notice. The Sundance Institute announced this week that they will use $1 million in new funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to bring…
Another month, another exciting announcement from the Miami Jewish Film Festival on a new project to benefit the community. In partnership with Independent Lens Television Service (ITVS), WPBT2, the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning, and Temple Beth Sholom, MJFF is launching the Community Cinema series, which will feature…
For all the works that U.S. studios make that are set in foreign countries, it’s tough to come up with American animated films that are genuinely linked to the country that they portray. You’ve got things like Madagascar and Ratatouille set elsewhere, but these and others don’t engage with the…
Vara: A Blessing Khyentse Norbu’s Vara: A Blessing begins strong, introducing audiences to Lila, a young woman who practices the art of bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance that evokes the art of temple dancers. In its first act, the film proposes a bit of a flip on the typical route…
In a unanimous vote, the Coral Gables Art Cinema’s Board of Directors have appointed a pioneer of film exhibition in Miami as its director of programming. Though in recent years he made name for himself as a Grammy-winning producer of Latin music, Miami’s knows him as a legend in the…
It’s only a few days until a taste of the annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) invades the newly renovated Tower Theater in Little Havana. The name of the minifest — MIFFecito — is a play on the cafecitos so prevalent in the neighborhood. MIFF executive director Jaie Laplante says…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than bodies, time and space and human connection get most memorably diced. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of the wrong man accused — or is he the…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests science…
The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft, and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…
A gloom hangs over writer/director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over — Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as…
Television is generally a happy medium, especially when it comes to broadcast. Sure, there’s the occasional serious drama or that hospital show that’s really about the doctor-on-doctor conflict and has little to do with medicine. Rarely does a show come along that tackles a serious subject matter while maintaining a…
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. In Hollywood movies, fat people are often the butt of jokes and more often than not, obese actors embrace the stereotype that they’re just funny-looking fools. So they take the parts and dive in with gusto to make careers exploiting themselves for ridicule. What makes…
After about an hour and a half meeting today, board members of the Coral Gables Art Cinema confirmed via vote that Nat Chediak will become the organization’s new director of programming. Press were not permitted inside the meeting, but members exiting this morning said it was a positive outcome. “Some…
With Lake Los Angeles director/writer Mike Ott presents a heart-rending but placid portrait of the often solitary pain of the undocumented immigrant. Ott effectively uses a quiet, low-key cinematic delivery that creeps up on the viewer for a simple, devastating finale that raises small gestures to noble acts of kindness…
The last time Nat Chediak found himself ensnared in a shakeup of a local cultural institution, he wound up on the wrong side of the power struggle. This time around, it appears luck is on the side of the co-founder and former executive director of the Miami International Film Festival…
“We like to think we are a humane country, but the way the United States treats their immigrants, particularly those from Latin American countries, is appalling.” Miami-born filmmaker Oscar Corral echoes the feelings of many in our city, thousands touched by the immigrant experience. His latest endeavor, The Crossfire Kids…
Though actor Roberto “Sanz” Sanchez lives in Los Angeles, he has a strong attachment to Miami. He grew up in Little Havana, after immigrating at 3 years old from Cuba to meet his mother in 1969. Tower Theater takes up a big part of his childhood memories in the neighborhood…
Borscht is officially back. The film fest dedicated to South Florida talent announced Wednesday that the “allegedly ninth” edition of the event will take place December 16 through December 21 this year. Since its first run in 2003, the Borscht Film Festival has evolved from a project of New World…
Following the recent resignation of longtime leader Robert Rosenberg, Coral Gables Art Cinema has selected Nat Chediak as its new program director. A source says an oral agreement between Chediak and cinema founder and former executive director, Steven Krams, will be confirmed at a meeting on Tuesday, October 14. Co-founder…
The Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace swapping out all of that bare-neck sensuality for some videogame ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the UK miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds, representing a dismal and damaging period in late-20th-century British history — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the…
The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior indie creep-out from 2012 whose creator, the writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, fashioned it according to three inviolable principles. One: Get the heroine (Caity Lotz) into…
