The fifth annual Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival does feel a little rudderless this year without founding director Robert Rosenberg at the helm, and the extension of screenings to Fort Lauderdale can make viewing a little difficult, since the films only show once. But there are some good films…
It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as Raising Victor Vargas, a coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett, which first premiered here at the Miami International Film Festival. The surprise isn’t in the plot — that would be too easy…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind, with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s baglike corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze, and croak. Voila, this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing is…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
Hunting of Man was originally titled Last Night in Miami, which tells you a little about the local connections of this film, screening as part of the Miami Latin Film Festival. The writer/director Joe Menendez is a Hialeah boy, and others involved in the production also hail from here. But…
Relentless cataloguing of images is one of the hallmarks of recent history. The Florida Moving Image Archive’s contribution to this year’s aviation-themed Dade Heritage Days is a study in the historical value of images never intended for the history books. Comprising mainly home movies and television and movie advertisements, the…
Maybe all you want out of your pop music is a few minutes of escape, a radio-friendly respite from the heavy humdrum of your workaday existence. Maybe you likes to hang with 50 Cent, who survived a few gunshots (and doesn’t let you forget it) to party another day; or…
The story of the Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros is decidedly cinematic. Four handsome lads from Havana’s working-class Cayo Hueso neighborhood formed the group in 1962. Accompanied by a guitarist, the singers perfected a swinging synthesis of American doo-wop and Cuban rumba. Los Zafiros shot to fame on the island,…
Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, moviegoers, and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas, or a…
It was only in 1967 that Great Britain struck from its jurisprudence the “common scold,” essentially a crime of catty insolence for which the convicted party — almost always a woman disturbing the peace by nagging a man — was punished via a public ducking into cold water. Nobody likes…
War, as it turns out, is good for absolutely nothing when it comes to anti-war songs. At the risk of sounding like Bill O’Reilly (who, no doubt, listens only to Wagner), it’s time to protest the protesters, most of whom are blowin’, all right, just not in the wind. The…
You know how boys love to play soldier? How they get stern-faced and march out to destroy an enemy whom they believe needs destroying? Well, actors are into that too. Sometimes they soldier on even when Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson isn’t around to help them frown determinedly. Such is…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers), and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It is flouting this choice that excites director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irréversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…
Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King adaptation genre, currently at 74, including film and TV, and counting. Taking the Internet Movie Database as a source, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38), closing in…
Adolf Hitler killed his own dog. Most of his other evil is well documented now, and words alone are inadequate anyway, so let’s begin by considering this comparatively microscopic offense. For the many who shower their canines with at least as much affection as they offer other human beings (and…
When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, felt its subject matter was a bit off post-September 11; they…
This is a story with a happy ending, because, so far, nothing bad has happened to indicate otherwise. There are no ratings to sweat over, no network executives to fight with, no cancellations to suffer through. The rough territories lie ahead, over the horizon of 8:30 p.m. this Sunday, when…
Ever since Amores Perros burst onto the international scene two years ago, Latin American cinema has been experiencing one of the most fertile periods in its history. Encompassing such works as Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Walter Salles’s Behind the Sun, these socially conscious, frequently brutal portraits of…
Hitler as artist … Hitler as artist … Damn. So much for the ol’ “summarize plot, tease overpaid actors, pontificate wildly” formula. Reviewing Max — about the wonder years of Der Führer (Noah Taylor) and his eponymous, fictional Jewish benefactor Max Rothman (John Cusack) — looks to be something of…
This should really piss you off: What follows is a story about a very funny movie you will have absolutely no chance of seeing any time soon. The powers that be who distribute movies–who copy prints, print up posters, deliver them to theaters, collect receipts, split profits (well…)–do not want…
