English 101 instructors sometimes combat plagiarism by having students read a piece and then write a summary from memory, in their own words. Most of the time, the resulting papers hit the beats of the originals, the paraphrased passages wallowing in humdrum vocabulary because the students haven’t yet developed their…
Baywatch kinda baffled me. This R-rated comedy adaptation of the cheesy but sincere beach-set action series — which somehow became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1990s — is a movie that should be as enjoyably ridiculous as its source material. In some instances, it is. Director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses)…
Female-lead film production team the 1310 Bandits has seen its fair share of hiccups and triumphs in creating short and feature-length films in South Florida.
Yes, dead men tell no tales — but neither, really, do the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Rather than stories, the series, of which this 2017 entry is the fifth, offers an unpalatable mix of mincing slapstick, rote derring-do, ponderous CGI, whiskery sea-chanty mysticism, and dutiful action sequences whose only…
Yes, there’s spoilers below for this unspoilable show. “Don’t let yourself be hurt this time,” sings Julee Cruise on “Falling,” the plushly minimalist 1989 synth ballad that, a year later, stripped of its vocal and lyrics, would become the opening theme for Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself wrote that lyric,…
A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results…
In Robin Swicord’s Wakefield, an adaptation of the late E.L. Doctorow’s short story of the same name, disillusioned lawyer Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) chases a raccoon from his decrepit backhouse and … never returns. The story’s not science fiction; Howard doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole. He’s still among…
Where are the goddamned roles for Diane Lane? Since her career launched, with a starring role as a precocious 13-year-old American girl in Paris in 1979’s A Little Romance, Lane seems to have confounded casting directors: Is she the button-nosed embodiment of joie de vivre or the anarchist post-punk tempest…
In a world where many people would rather binge-watch 13 Reasons Why on Netflix, two men from Miami are changing the game. Their series, Flaming Classics, educates audiences about classic films that are feminine, queer, campy, and everything in between — and includes live performances by drag queens. It’s 2017, Donald Trump is president, and we need this.
The film is highly self-aware, and Juliette Binoche’s performance as Aude Van Peteghem is delightfully redolent of the snooty dames so memorably captured by Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers’ films.
A young man enters a building with a gun in his hand. Already, he has shot the man at the door, and before he is finished, lying in a pool of his own blood, he will have wasted two more. This sounds like a news item from yesterday or today,…
In 2008, the National Academy of Sciences saw an opening for outreach: Get real science in the movies. And by November of that year, it had begun the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which offered a way for Hollywood to link up with scientists to advise and consult on projects. Dr…
It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…
The stats and facts are alarming. On average, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice, the U.S. sends two million children to juvenile prison per year. And annually, about 250,000 minors are tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults. Beyond the figures are the individuals and their families impacted by juvenile incarceration,…
Chris Gethard, the comedian and talk-show host, has the look of his own comic-strip avatar. Those black glasses, that elfin, upright forelock, the eyebrows that dance in alarm and amazement: Onstage, in his one-man show, Career Suicide, Gethard could be Charles Schulz’s sketch of Chris Gethard, a work of cartoon…
Pour one out for the summer movie season, which was once Memorial Day till Labor Day but now has spread like a self-replicating, geometrically evolving A.I. determined to cleanse the Earth of human vermin. Around the turn of the century, the summer movies started showing up the first weekend in…
Ever wonder how New York City was able to escape L.A.’s expressway-choked fate? Thank Jane Jacobs, the journalist, author and community activist who continually predicted — and fought to stave off — the public-planning policies that would kill the American city. In Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, documentarian Matt…
Heavyweight almost-champ Chuck Wepner was a character long before he inspired Sylvester Stallone to pen Rocky. But Wepner is no Rocky Balboa. Sure, he comes from a working-class town (Bayonne, New Jersey), and when he boxed, he took a good punch, bled like a hemophiliac and dreamed of taking home…
Growing up on Key Biscayne in the ’90s, Xavier Manrique’s foremost passion was playing tennis. But there was always something about the movies. “Any time it was raining, we couldn’t play tennis, so we’d watch movies,” Manrique tells New Times. “I’d obsess over everything on the screen: the photography, the music, the costumes. Same with every Sunday, when my Dad would take me to the Riviera or the Miracle Center to see a movie.”
A light and cheery appraisal of a somber subject, Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit focuses on the writers and editors assigned to the necrology desk of The New York Times. Like other chronicles of dead-tree media made in the past decade — The September Issue, R.J. Cutler’s Vogue ode (2009); Andrew…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…
