If you don’t have religion, you should at least have The Leftovers. HBO’s rapturous drama hasn’t found much of an audience during its brief time on Earth, but those who listen to its sermon long enough tend to convert — nothing else on television seeks, so nakedly and unironically, to…
Twice I’ve described Kitty Green’s curious, alienating docu-whatzit Casting JonBenet to friends, and twice I’ve been asked, with surprising heat, “Why?” and “What’s the point?” So, this time, before we get into the specifics of what this documentary actually documents, let’s take a moment to consider what the film isn’t…
Down the street from the bums on Brickell and around the corner from Blackbird Ordinary, there is a gleaming, chrome and concrete monolith poised to transform one of the more blighted and ignored areas of downtown.
In Eric D. Howell’s adaptation of Silvio Raffo’s ghostly 1996 novel, Voice From the Stone, a timid woman finds employment as a nanny with a rural family ravaged by grief. The longer she stays in their cavernous, stone-and-stucco villa, the more she comes to act, talk and look like the…
Keep your eyes on the magician’s hands. She’ll attempt to distract you with compliments and silly quips, but her most effective feint will be the story she tells as she shuffles the cards. She might give quaint mention to a lover’s spat between the King of Hearts and the Queen…
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about corruption. That’s true despite the fact that Mungiu underplays the typical elements found in tales about this subject: You won’t find many fast-talking crooks, sinister cops or elaborate sting operations here. Or a looming sense…
Everyone has, at some point, fantasized about being someone else. In Julia Ducournau’s Raw, we see that longing literalized in an unusual way: not just by dressing up like other people or copying their actions, but by eating them.
Clad in his trademark all-white garb, with a matching bandanna and Panama hat, Alan Faena is the namesake of the city’s most upscale hotel, Faena Hotel Miami Beach. With his wife and close collaborator Ximena Caminos, he launched the Faena District to house the North American operations of Faena Art during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2016.
The latest edition of the MiFo LGBT Film Festival will screen a variety of queer films April 21 through 30. For ten days, you can catch movies that offer something different from the straight white nonsense you endure daily. But given dozens of films, which should you prioritize? We’re here to help.
Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…
“Rob has this ridiculous beard and it’s such great, self-effacing, wonderful work he’s doing,” James Gray says about his film recounting the life of a British explorer who disappeared while pursuing his lifelong obsession with a mythical city in the Amazon.
Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
Filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has depicted many extraordinary events in his work: time travel, alien invasion, bomb threats, the apocalypse. His latest, Colossal, tells a tale of giant-monster attacks. “It’s always really exciting when you bring together the rules of fiction and the rules of reality, or rather the lack of rules of reality,” Vigalondo says.
Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing…
“I’ve been trained for this.” Those words — or some variation — come up several times throughout James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and they serve as one key to this strange, sprawling, majestic film. In adapting the 2009 nonfiction book about the search for a fabled city in…
HBO’s acid-bathed Beltway satire Veep didn’t exactly predict our absurd political reality. But it did come close enough that revisiting past seasons is like watching footage of a train wreck run backwards in slow motion. The episode called “C**tgate” brought a vaginal euphemism into a presidential election. “Election Night” saw…
First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…
Obsolete Media Miami, our city’s repository for 35mm slides, archival motion picture materials, and other legacy media, has brought some of the coolest experimental art events to our city over the last few years: a side-by-side presentation of Dracula and Drácula, a 16mm film presentation brought to the massive…
In the spring of 1979, with a new film to promote, Woody Allen agreed to a lengthy profile in the New York Times Magazine. In it, Allen talks a little about Manhattan, the film in question, which follows an alter ego named Isaac through a period of professional and romantic…
The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World…
Holy motors! How will they top this one? This is perhaps the fastest and, if not, certainly the most furious of the Fast & Furious movies. The beauty of the Fast & Furious movies is that no car stunt is ever too nonsensical.
