Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilery details about last night’s episode of The Office. Last night’s series finale of The Office was full of moments designed to make the show’s fans choke up — flashbacks, resurrected recurring jokes from earlier seasons, touching documentary-style interviews. But for South Florida viewers, one…
Hang on to your Botox. The mob wives are about to invade our sunny shores. The infamous raspy-voiced, big-lipped Angela “Big Ang” Raiola is headed to the Magic City. The top-heavy ex-mob wife has brought her ridiculous crew of horny housewives into town for the filming of the newest season…
Wanna feel old? MTV’s original true-to-life (well, sorta) TV series, The Real World, is now casting its 29th season. Yeah, it’s thisclose to the big 3-0. Seems like just yesterday the world was hating on Puck’s obnoxious antics and Stephen socked Irene with the slap heard ’round the world. Memories…
“Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
A few weeks ago, the ginned-up controversy over Serena Williams’ performance of the Crip Walk after defeating Maria Sharapova at the London 2012 Olympic Games was given another life cycle via a gif on Tumblr. This time that site’s “niggerati” assailed the racist bent of the uproar, which was centered…
“The meek shall inherit the Earth,” somebody said once — probably Truffaut. Two pictures into his thrilling career, writer-director Antonio Campos seems determined to show us that might not be anything to celebrate. Campos’s feature debut, 2008’s Afterschool, was essentially one part Blow Up to three parts Rushmore-as-psychological-horror-flick. While it…
Compton Royalty: A New Doc Examines Venus and Serena’s rise From Their Upbringing in Southeast L.A.
“Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!” Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he’s filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson…
At Any Price Makes Good Drama of Bad Seeds
Expand or Die By John Anderson Responding to the uproar earlier this month over the passage–and President Obama’s signage–of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate…
Until his arrest in 1986, most people believed Richard Kuklinski to be an all-American family man. In reality, this suburban New Jersey “banker” made his fortune working as a hit man for the Mafia, killing more than 100 people and often freezing and dismembering their bodies to obscure the time…
In the same way novels can be better and worse than journalism at processing history, so can movies be better and worse than novels: too unreal yet too specific. For the movie of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, director Mira Nair mounts a sensitive retrospective procedural of radicalization: Here’s how a bright…
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola’s movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she’s better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of…
One of the most exciting things about attending the Cannes Film Festival is being among the first people to see the films the world will be talking about. That’s one of the terrible things, too: There’s no one to warn you when you’re about to see a puppy murder, a…
François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival — a bird’s-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — has been crazy about it. The couple’s lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She’s two…
If there’s one character Brady Corbet runs the risk of being typecast as, it’s the creep. Corbet pushed the edge of creepdom in Michael Haneke’s Hollywood remake of Funny Games, where he played one of two homicidal preppy kids who slowly torture and murder a family vacationing at their Long…
What’s worse than a handful of drunk, plastic, self-obsessed, quarrelling women with too much time on their expertly manicured hands? A handful of drunk, plastic, self-obsessed, quarelling brides. And if there’s any reality left in Bravo’s Real Housewives of Miami reality series, that’s exactly what we can all expect when…
Don’t be surprised if this weekend, the city seems lousy with film crews. Fear not: there is not a pandemic of Kardash-ococcus spreading through Miami. Rather, the 48 Hour Film Project begins tonight. Teams of filmmakers will be given 48 hours to make a short film in one of 15…
On the left, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan in the 2013 version, and Mia Farrow in the same role in 1974.Anyone who’s familiar with the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford should recognize the scenes and shots from trailers for the 2013 version, which opens Friday with…
The Great Gatsby, With DiCaprio and Maguire: Great but Not Always Good
Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…
