Friday was my last day in Venice, which always makes me blue. Thursday morning, on the way to my final screening, a tourist with an Eastern European accent I couldn’t quite identify stopped me a block or so from the sad and shuttered Hotel des Bains and asked me if…
Yesterday, we highlighted nine comedies, musicals, and animated movies to keep in your rear view as we plunge into the best time of the year for movies. Now it’s time to shed light on dramas — you do want some drama, yes, yes, yes, yes drama. We’ve narrowed it down…
Cymbeline is the misunderstood schoolchild of Shakespeare’s plays, the misfit who speaks up at odd times and sometimes says the wrong thing, awkward in all kinds of obvious ways. It’s a special-needs play, but the beauty of it is right there in its bones, not least because in it we…
Concert films come and go all the time, with most of them not leaving much of an impression on the world after they premiere. But some of them do last, and those are the ones that offer engaging and often different experiences to the norm. Some even transcend the limitations…
The fall movie season is not just for would-be Oscar contenders to come out punching left and right. There always has to be room for laughter and feel food musicals that make you want to sing along. And those animated creatures that give you the warm-and-fuzzies. After you’re done catching…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’ fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’ll be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in what is…
If older man/younger woman matchups make many people uncomfortable, the older man/much younger woman combo tends to make them apoplectic. It would be impossible for Nabokov to publish Lolita today, now that all of life, and all of art, must be arranged, categorized, and restricted as a way of protecting…
The Identical is Elvis-slash-fiction that could have been written by a spinster church organist. Its premise is intriguing: What if Jesse Presley, Elvis’ twin brother who was stillborn at birth, was in fact secretly given to a traveling minister (Ray Liotta) and his infertile wife (Ashley Judd)? What happens next…
Every other year or so, someone comes down the indie-movie pike with an idea for an unconventional zombie movie — as opposed to the workaday ones, where the dead simply return to life and chew on limbs and stuff. Life After Beth, the debut film from writer-director Jeff Baena, strives…
Forrest Gump has turned 20 and is celebrating its birthday with a weeklong IMAX release. It’s a significant milestone for the six-time Academy Award winner. Today, 1994 is as far away from the present as the Vietnam War was from it. Forrest Gump was a fable without a moral, the…
John Wojtowicz may be the perfect embodiment of Maslow’s ideal of self-actualization. The inspiration for Al Pacino’s character in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and now the subject of Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren’s fascinating documentary The Dog, Wojtowicz was many things: soldier, bank robber, libertine, and both “Goldwater Republican”…
To live in Miami is to be immersed in Cuban culture, but how many of us really know the tale of our neighbors, our ancestors, and ourselves? José Enrique Pardo had enough of romantic Hollywood depictions and took matters into his own hands. With only two short films under his…
In celebration of the reopening of Little Havana’s beloved art house, Tower Theater, the Miami International Film Festival has announced a four-day mini-film festival featuring exclusive premieres, an opening night party, guests, and a seminar. The festival’s director Jaie Laplante has dubbed the little festival MIFFecito in the spirit of…
Think back to summer 2005, when the notion of tattoo reality television was a novelty with the smash hit Miami Ink. Since then, artist and reality stars like Kat Von D have emerged and spin offs like LA Ink, London Ink, and Madrid Ink have emerged from virgin TV viewing…
Most of us would agree that there’s only one Al Pacino. But this year in Venice, there are actually two: Pacino appears in two films at the festival this year, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, about a lonely Texas locksmith stuck in a romantic dream, and, playing out of competition, Barry…
“I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so, I’m so… scared!” Jessie Spano immortalized those words on Saved by the Bell. It also perfectly summed up how most felt before the premiere of last night’s Lifetime docudrama The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story. Unlike the more scandalous and indulgent Beverly Hills 90210, Saved…
For everyone patiently awaiting the next edition of the Miami International Film Festival like we are, there’s finally a way to get a bit of a taste before the time comes around next March. That’s right; this coming October 16 through 19, there’s a mini-festival for audiences that will provide…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
The gent at the Delta check-in counter back in New York sighed when he saw where I was headed. “Romantic Venezia!” he said, and the comment stopped me short, because film festivals located in the most beautiful settings in the world have a way of making you forget – almost…
Only a few days ago a panhandler in a wheelchair was shot and killed not too far north of downtown Miami. The motive of the suspected shooter — who was taken into custody after a police chase — remains unknown, but it’s doubtful the deceased, 58-year-old Israel Zequra, had enemies…
Genius is hell, both for the blessed and those stuck in the shadows, cursed to spend a lifetime of smashing their heads against the glass. In its presence we find ourselves dwarfed and dumb, like moths. We know we’re before brilliance we can’t comprehend — and we know we’ll never…
Weep at another whiff of an Elmore Leonard adaptation, one that nails down neither the peppery laughs nor the street-crime desperation that are key to the writer’s work. Instead, the comedy is too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story…
